


All the places you have been

by cicak



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Lives, Backstory, Deepthroating, Episode Fix-It: s02e13 Mizumono, Face-Fucking, Fix-It, Hannibal is Hannibal, Intercrural Sex, Kinda, M/M, Masks, Murder Family, Murder Husbands, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Scenery Porn, Soviet Hannibal, Stockholm Syndrome, The endless Sahara desert, Trains, Travel, Venice, Will makes bad decisions, World Travel, everyone has a plan, for a given value of fix it, trans-mongolian railway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-03-20 11:20:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3648420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The murder family on tour. Yes, a heart should always go one step too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Baltimore -> Marseille

Once Will nodded his head in acquiescence, the whole operation set into motion like clockwork.

The paramedics arrived late because of a fortuitously timed 30 car pile up on the freeway. There was enough time for evidence to be removed, bags to be taken from behind a false bottom of a cupboard and put in the non-descript car parked out back. Enough time for Hannibal to drive away and join the flow of traffic in the pouring rain before the sirens caught up to them.

The paramedics scope the house once Alana is secured, and find Jack still clinging to consciousness, a grip that fades as he sees them and lets go, a trust fall into the arms of medical services. They find nothing but ghosts in the rest of the house. Forensics will identify the blood in the kitchen as Jack’s and Hannibal's, but there are miscellaneous skin cells from women, Alana, but also miraculously, Abigail Hobbs, the nauseatingly familiar narrative of a supposedly dead teen hidden in plain sight ripped from the pages of the worst tabloids. Two bedrooms had been slept in. One was the bedroom of a man of means and desires, everything clad in silk, leather and secrets. The other, hidden down a hall that was easy to miss unless you were standing right in front of it, was of a young woman speedily outgrowing the life she had planned. In among the carefully folded clothes, well thumbed books and desperately scrawled notebooks they found a teddy bear under the bed and a knife under the pillow, as if childish things had been discarded for the reassurance of sharpened steel.

Seemingly every investigator in the state is present within the next two hours, and a crowd gathers in the pouring rain to watch the small solemn army of men and women in HAZMAT suits pack the contents of the fridge, freezer, pantry, basement, deep freeze and safe to be processed. The first wave of evidence collection is done in a matter of hours in a stunned silence. Those of the investigators familiar with human anatomy, which is the vast majority of them, even if the knowledge is 20 years long buried under bio labs and a different sun, put out of their minds the length of the leg bones of the packages marked ‘veal’ and the size and shape of the hearts that were too delicate to belong to bulls. For now, all these things are evidence and missing people balanced between the world of identification and proper burial and the lands of the lost.

There is no black humour and no exposition, nor any extrapolation on what could have happened. No police talk, for once. The police themselves stand back and watch the coolers packed heavy with freezer bricks to preserve the frost before they can be placed in the evidence freezer. A cast iron pot is carried out by someone wearing oven gloves. It is a spectacle happening in near silence.

In the confusion of the discovery of Jack, the basement and the hidden bedroom, Will’s absence was not noticed for nearly 2 hours. The lead agent had been incorrectly briefed he was accounted for, thought to be a mistaken statement of ‘Will was here’ being taken for ‘Will is here’. The panic when he wasn’t found to be helping with the investigation, or in the hospital, or in his home with the phone unplugged spread throughout the assembled investigators. A frantic search was carried out for a missing corpse, but none, of course, was found.

It was later determined that this was the window that allowed those the press later referred to as the murder family to leave the country.

* * *

 

The greater Baltimore area has more exit ports than you could imagine, especially if you expand into the network of private airfields around Washington, and Hannibal Lecter seemingly had an escape plan for each of them. In the car, Will held Abigail’s warm, warm hand (so alive, her pulse delicate beneath her skin but so strong all the same), and stared at her as if she was going to disappear if he blinked. He shivered slightly, remembering leaving his coat draped on Alana and hoped it hadn’t become her shroud.

They were all quiet for different reasons. Will could feel shock settling in, he figured Abigail was probably the same, while Hannibal was merely concentrating on his expert conducting of the orchestra of their circumstances. They pulled into a private airfield and parked smartly, not appearing like fugitives yet. Hannibal got out, and didn’t bother to forbid them to move. The instruction was implicit. Will wanted to run and take a chance. Grab Abigail and make for the single light in the Nissen hut that passes for the terminal here. The car wasn’t even locked. Hannibal was nowhere in sight. Yet, Will knew he wouldn’t make it, even though he was sure that Hannibal didn’t have a gun on him, he knew that he would never get very far. Part of him needed to be the kind of person who would at least try, so that when this ended he could say ‘he made me. He threatened me. I tried to escape. I did all I could.’

‘Forgive me.’

Abigal takes his hand and squeezes it. Her squeeze says a lot about her year in captivity. Her tiny, rueful smile tells him everything, says that she tried what he wants to try and she knows how it ends, and so he squeezes back, and leaves his seatbelt on.

After what felt like an hour of waiting in the dark car not speaking but breathing out the dregs of adrenaline in their veins, Hannibal returned and opened the door like a gentleman and ushered them onto a small plane that was to take them over the border to Canada. Hannibal gave the pre-flight instruction like the world’s most overqualified and terrifying flight attendant. It was 2AM and the rain was finally starting to subside. They were to make good time over the border, and they were booked on the first flight to Paris out of Montreal. Hannibal handed him an embossed leather pouch containing his new identity: a Dutch passport with his name listed as William Graeme Radvila, a Lithuanian driving licence in the same name, and a British civil partnership certificate listing Henri Radvila, a Lithuanian national, as his registered partner of five years. Abigail Radvila is Henri’s daughter from a previous relationship, an American national, her mother listed as Christine Fortyn. Their passports are perfect forgeries, complete with visas, backdated letters of reference, careless bite marks and unflattering photographs. They documents spoke of a life well travelled, a narrative of a couple who flew to the US for work frequently and to Bora-Bora for their Honeymoon.

The pilot had completed his pre-flight checks and the engines spun up and quickly they were off. Will dug his fingers into the arms of the seats, the leather of the private jet soft and well oiled, and Will was suddenly gripped by the knowledge that leather is skin, and that he had no idea what Hannibal did with the skin of his victims. He swallowed, pushing the thought down, his stomach churning terror into butter into bile.

Once they reach cruising altitude he hoped he would be able to calm himself, take stock of the plan. Instead, his heart skipped beats with the strength of his hope. He hoped Jack would be okay. There was still a smear of blood under one fingernail that he had picked up somewhere, possibly from his attempt to staunch the bleeding, but more likely a print transferred from Hannibal’s hand when he took it and together, they stepped into phase two.

He hoped that he wasn’t making a mistake. Or more optimistically, he hoped he was making the right mistake.

He’d never been a very good optimist.

Their journey to Paris is remarkable in its ease. By now there should be warrants out for their arrests, their faces should be plastered over every international airport on the North American continent - strike that, more likely everyone from the polar bears to the penguins should be on the lookout for them, and yet they walked into first class like any other rich family with money to burn. The Air France flight from Montreal to Paris is smooth and professional. Once the doors are locked, and Hannibal hands Will his glass of champagne and they are in the air the momentousness of them having got away with it, having got away from the FBI and police hits him. He finds himself laughing as the world falls away from them, up, up into the clouds. Abigail falls asleep as soon as they reach altitude. Hannibal drinks more champagne, and Will stares at Hannibal’s hands, imagines them choking the life out of him or taking a knife to Abigail with tears in his eyes. He sleeps, eventually, but the dreams are ones that leave a bad taste in his mouth and no memory but of undefined badness.

Half a day later, the three of them walk through the automated gates for EU Nationals at Charles de Gaulle to their freedom with nary a whisper.

Hannibal drives the car with Abigail sitting beside him. The car is nicer than any rental Will had ever had, even on FBI business, but Hannibal is trying hard to seduce them both through overdose of pleasure. There is more butter-soft leather and mineral water in the cup holders and Abigail is staring out the window at the Parisian suburbs. Will is in the back seat, hips stretched out so he is half-sprawled diagonally across the three seats. He occupies himself staring at the back of Hannibal’s ear, at his hairline, looking for a crack in his facade.

France speeds past them, endless fields dotted with picturebook chateaux and ancient stone villages. As the day passes, the crops give to vineyards, with the alps rising in the far distance. This gives into the city of Lyon, its clusters of churches speeding past as quickly as the traffic will allow them.

By the time they stop they’ve driven the entire spine of France and it is well into the bustle of the evening of the southern port of Marseille. Hannibal ushers them out firmly, keeping a hand on both of them until the last moment, and hands the keys to the car back to the car hire chain’s booth in the railway station, and then leads them through the streets of Marseille to a small door set back in one of the back streets. The house is beautiful, right in the heart of the old port. Hannibal disappears soon after they step through the door, locking them firmly in the house. He has no need to warn them not to leave.

Abigail falls asleep again after a small dinner that Will insists on knocking up from what the landlord had left for them. The fridge is well stocked, but neither of them feel like they can stomach meat, however beautiful the steak and veal are in their paper wrappings. They eat tomatoes and cheese and good bread and extremely fizzy lemonade that makes Abigail hiccup ferociously, and talk about nothing whatsoever, both of them babbling the incoherence of the overtired and still-terrified. He escorts her to bed and tucks her in as if she wasn’t old enough to be in college, and locks the door, pocketing the heavy key and feeling the weight of it seemingly dragging him down further into this surreal world.

He suddenly needs air, and climbing stairs after stairs of this long, thin house he ends up on the roof terrace. Yachts glitter under street lights and there is a soft lilting sound of distant laughing couples. The sea air is familiar, and reminds him of homes long forgotten but for sense memory, in another French speaking port a world and a lifetime away. In another universe it could be a perfect holiday. Will had always wanted to visit France.

There is a small railing around the top that is perfect height for him to step over and jump. It seemed though, that Hannibal had even thought of that. The height of the building would make any jump difficult to survive without a broken leg at best, but not quite enough to kill you outright.

There is a distant thump of the front door shutting, and Hannibal appears a minute later with two glasses of wine, and takes a seat.

Will clinks his glass with Hannibal’s almost out of habit. The wine is warm and spicy.

“Where are we going?” Will asks, eventually.

“I thought we might take a holiday”, Hannibal replied. “It has been a long time since I had any time to breathe.”

He smiles at Will, face wide open with emotion and charming, and Will hopes once again that this is only merely a bad mistake.


	2. Marseille -> M’zab

Will expected that Hannibal would not keep them in Marseille for long, but he is shaken awake  just 3 hours after he finally manages to drop off at 2AM and shoved, half asleep and heart pumping with adrenaline out of the door, barefoot and stumbling with Hannibal’s arm linked tightly with his. He is just glad he fell asleep in his clothes.

Abigail is bleary-eyed next to him, but she managed to get dressed and even seems to be carrying coffee, which says a lot about how Hannibal perceives the two of them.

They walk to the new port where an ugly car ferry sits, somehow seeming like it is too heavy to be afloat yet holding its own in the slack water of the time between the tides. Hannibal murmurs in flawless French to the man who takes their tickets, making small talk about his useless husband and daughter, and then pulls them both aboard.

Will has no idea where they are going, but from the look of their fellow passengers and the scraps of language he picks up, plus the hazy memories of AP Geography he suspects one of France’s former North African colonies across the sea.

After an interminable wait, the ferry slowly pulls out of the harbour.

It will take a day to get to Algiers, according to the tannoy announcement. For all the ferry is a bit of a rust-bucket, the mediterranean sea is beautiful in the morning. Will has always had a soft spot for rust buckets, and this one is more than capable of making the journey.

He breathes in a deep breath of strong sea air, and then becomes aware that Hannibal is standing by his elbow, boxing him in against the railings, all wide shoulders and primed menace.

“Will. Good morning.” Hannibal speaks his pleasantries with deliberate menace. “How are you finding the journey so far? I hope it has not been too uncomfortable.”

“Physically or emotionally?” Will dashes off without thinking.

“You made a choice, Will. You are here with Abigail, but you are also here with me. If you are regretting that choice then things may get difficult for the three of us. I do not enjoy travelling alone, but I can make exceptions if you want to...leave.”

“I made my choice to come with you Hannibal. This-” he gestures at the south coast of France and the blue waters around them “isn’t informed consent. I don’t know where I’m going. You could have any plans. You have my passport. You worked hard to make me an unimpeachable accomplice in murdering my boss and running away with a known killer and suspected worse. I made my choices, but I am stuck with you.”

Will has never seen Hannibal furious, but he does then, for a split second. Hannibal’s face curls into rage before he irons his features out into something merely stoic and dangerous.

“Do not...do not say things we will both regret, Will.” Hannibal closes his hand round Will’s wrist as a display of strength. “You think you know what I can do, who I am now you have embraced your own true nature, but you have no idea what depths I have risen through on my journey. Understand, I will not hesitate to show you, if you make me, if you _force_ me...”

Will is frozen, but is saved by the loud sound of retching. Abigail is leaning over the side, puking her heart out, the heft of the ship not entirely counteracting the motion of the ocean.

Will rushes to her side, holds her hair back, murmurs things. He turns to Hannibal, who has not moved.

“I’m going to take her down to the cabin.”

Hannibal nods, and walks briskly away without looking back.

 

* * *

 

They get down to the cabin and lock the door before Abigail straightens up and looks him in the eye.

“You could have been killed just then, do you not even realise that?”

He stares at her. Abigail wipes her mouth and sets her jaw.

Will knows they have limited time. “Abigail, I can’t form a plan for us to get out of here until I know what I’m dealing with.

Abigail scoffs. “You have absolutely no idea what you’re dealing with, if that’s the approach you want to take.”

“Cards on the table, okay?” he says, hands up. “You tell me everything you know, everything that happened in the last year, and I tell you everything I know, and then we make a plan. Not now, but soon.”

They made themselves comfortable, Will with his back against the wall and Abigail cross-legged. They each had a private cabin, but despite the expense the carpet was rough industrial quality and everything had the beige tinge of a long-ignored no smoking policy. The Mediterranean was choppy with the spring tides and the fixtures slightly creaked when a large wave hit.

“He wasn’t...creepy”, she starts, but she stares at her hands throughout her testimony. “I had expected him to show his ‘real side’, so to speak. That he would take off a mask and be creepy, or try and rape me. But really, he was nice.”

“He cut off your _ear_ , Abigail”, Will cut in, with rage not nearly as well suppressed as he would have liked.

She rolls her eyes. “I know, _Will_ , I was there. He cut off my ear in my _fucking family home_ , with a scalpel. It was quick, and I couldn’t move, but I felt it. I think he hoped that I was too out of it to feel it but I felt everything, his knees on my elbows so my body wouldn’t move, his hand bracing the side of my jaw and the gliding of the knife --” her voice wobbled, and she burst into tears, burying her head in her hands.

Will sat silently across from her, paralysed himself with loathing for being so flippant. She managed to regain composure fairly quickly, which he figured was how you coped living in fear for a year.

“Anyway,” she says, her eyes red but her face set as if to dare him to comfort her with platitudes. “After that he was nice. He treated me well. He brought me paints and books and looked after the wound, and never raised his voice or hit me and fed me well. I was terrified, the whole time. I would have preferred him to hit me, to taunt me, to treat me like his captive, make me feel that my fear was justified. Instead I could feel the world slipping away from me. I lived in this tiny cage like something precious but I didn’t know why. I had no concept of the passing of time. There was no window, no natural light, no ambient sound. No one could hear me, and I couldn’t hear them.”

“But once, there was an opportunity. The door was locked but it hadn’t completely clicked closed so the mechanism was resting on the frame. I waited until 3AM, I took nothing with me. I carried shoes in my hand. I opened the door and it was silent, the whole house was silent. I made it down the hall and then he appeared from the shadows and held a rag over my face and I passed out. When I came to he was sitting there and gave me a fatherly talk about how disappointed he was with me and how he thought I was on his side.”

“Oh god” Will muttered. Abigail smiled ruefully. “I was honestly just glad he hadn’t taken my other ear. I was so convinced he would. He told me that if I tried to escape again he would cut off my feet. He said it like it was a joke, like he was my father, but god, it was so surreal, because he could. And I know he would.”

“Anyway, after that he kept coming in to talk to me. He mostly talked about you, and Doctor Bloom, and how he wanted to take you and me away and have a grand adventure. That he would need my help. But that he would only be able to let me come with him if I promised to help him. That I always helped my father, and that he would only need me to help him one more time and then we would be free to go where we please. So two days ago he took me from my room and let me see the garden, and then hid me in his bedroom, and when I saw Doctor Bloom I knew what I needed to do.”

She looks small and helpless for a moment. “There will be no escape point for us. He never drops his guard. If you think he has, if you think you can get away, that is the exact moment you can’t. He will test us, both of us, very soon. He will likely continuously test us after that.”

She looks up at him, suddenly impossibly small like a little girl. “You’re smart, Will. You’ll work out how to play him. He likes me vulnerable. He will want something similar from you.”

She yawns. “I really just want to sleep all of this away. Tell Hannibal you managed to settle me and keep him away. He hates the smell of vomit.”

* * *

 

When Will gets back up onto the deck the sun is climbing into midday and Hannibal is nowhere to be seen. The sea is the kind of blue that invites a long list of adjectives, and the ferry continues its low rumbling chug through the waves providing a background rhythm as they crash upon the bow.

He finds a corner out of the direct line of the sun, and wrapped in his jacket to keep away the chill of the spring air, he tries to catch some sleep. He wakes a few hours later with Hannibal shaking his shoulder and announcing that lunch is being served. His back is screaming and he feels even worse than when he started, but as hunger is a large part of that, he follows Hannibal through into the cafeteria.

Over their lunches (Will’s a perfectly serviceable croque monsieur and Hannibal’s salad nicoise doing its best to offend Hannibal’s senses at a molecular level) Will decides to talk.

“I am sorry, Hannibal” he opens with, just as Hannibal had given in and started on the salad.

Hannibal waves his hands dismissively, before swallowing, grimacing and taking a drink of water. “Please, let us both forget it. You were tired, Will. Let us leave it on deck.”

“I need you to know though,” Will pushes on, “the last few months, they were real. This whole thing, this escape, feels like a dream, a dream where I get you and Abigail and freedom, where no one dies-”

“It is highly likely that Jack Crawford died of his injuries.” Hannibal demurs.

Will notes that he doesn’t mention Alana. Perhaps he didn’t know of her fate, or thought that Will hadn’t seen her. He files that away for later consideration.

“Yes, well, he had it coming” he spits, and takes a sip of his wine to hide the pang of guilt at saying it.

Quietly, he adds “I just wanted you to know that I am...consenting.” He looks at Hannibal over the rim of his glass as he takes another sip. Hannibal is staring, as if able to see into his brain through sheer will. He holds the purity of the thought front and centre in his mind, and does not think of his conversation with Abigail, or of duty and necessity until Hannibal looks away, pushing the offending salad away with a grunt of disgust.

“I am glad, Will. I feel that this has the opportunity to be the trip of a lifetime, if we have luck on our side.”

“I have no doubt, you are the luckiest man I know.”

“Oh, be sure, dear Will, that very little of what I do has anything to do with luck.”

Will, feeling woozy, checks in on Abigail, who he is glad to note is sound asleep in her own cabin, before giving up and retiring to his own. He falls asleep as soon as his head hits the lumpy pillow, and sleeps near straight through. At some point he thinks Hannibal came in, but his dreams were so vivid he cannot be sure.

The ferry slowly puffs into the harbour in Algiers, giving Will, Abigail and Hannibal plenty of time to take in its old-world charm, the waterfront hotels lined up like teeth to welcome visitors into the maw of North Africa. The quotidian parts of the city rise in a tightly woven jumble behind, houses facing each-which way, to the crowning glory of the old casbah sitting on top of the hill.

They pass through passport control with ease, which is likely partly the quality of Hannibal’s fake passports and partly the complete disinterest the single passport clerk has for the volume of people he has to process.

Hannibal rents a car again, paying in cash, and instructs them to all pile in. He drives them first up to the casbah, and they do their first genuine tourist thing, wandering the mouldering halls of the old palace, taking in the delights of the hammam with its richly coloured tiles, and Hannibal pointing out the original Roman features, thousands of years old but still standing, woven into the structure of all that came after.

 

They watch the sun set from the very top of the tower, and then once the heat of the day is mostly gone, Hannibal drives them out of the city. Its not yet the desert, but you can feel the evidence of it by the chill in the air. Algiers is an anomaly, which becomes more apparent the further you get out of the city. The mountains start to give way to flatness, even by the light of the dim streetlights that line the roads, you can tell that the place is changing with every mile. The desert is encroaching, millimeter by millimeter, the rocks of the Atlas mountains slowly peeling away to smaller and smaller rocks until everything for miles around is smooth sand

After several hours Hannibal pulls off the main road, and shortly after they find themselves at a house. The way it is lit up causes a pang of familiarity to ring in Will’s chest, an echo of his own ship in the dark, so many thousands of miles away.

The house is luxurious and cool in temperature, large airy rooms and every surface finished with marble. The bed is light but comfortable, the room he is given lined with books in both english and arabic, thankfully. It locks from the outside, and the windows are far too small to climb through, but there is the illusion of safety, and that is important.

  
He resolves to go for a run tomorrow. The stagnation of travel has started to migrate to his bones.

* * *

 

The desert sun wakes him, streaming through the narrow window straight into his optic nerve as if his eyelid didn’t exist. Will wakes, and finds clothes at the foot of the bed, and the door open just enough to show the entrance to the bathroom across the spacious hall.

Hannibal is cooking breakfast, and Abigail is sitting at the table in the corner of the kitchen reading a book and watching him in the reflection of the toaster.

Breakfast is eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes, harissa and preserved lemons, with thick wedges of bread still warm from the oven. There is coffee, which Hannibal paternally instructs Abigail not to stir as it is unfiltered. “Gravity has been doing the work of paper filters for the hundreds of years before the percolator was invented. The best things take time, and this is one of them.”

Together all of it smells amazing, as is expected of Hannibal’s meals. Yet, like the language of flowers, there is meaning implicit in the choice of a vegetarian menu, a concession to the shock of the new. They were all sitting to break their fast together for the first time since they left Baltimore, and the lack of flesh is a safety net for Will and Abigail.

Abigail speaks first. “Where are we, Hannibal?”

“We are in Ghardaia, the largest town in the heptapolis of M’zab, on the edge of the Sahara desert. It is a fascinating place, as you will find. Truly an example of how to live comfortably at the edge of the world. This town was the first, and has been continuously occupied since the 10th century, and I must confess it has always been a fascination for me since I saw pictures of it in a book as a boy. It is really a thrill to be here.”

Abigail smiles to herself, and takes another mouthful of her breakfast.

Will politely continues the conversation, picking up where she left off. “Is there much to see?”

“It is close to the changing of the seasons to summer, when people move out in favour of the much cooler palm groves further back the way we came. The town is busy for now, but soon it will be deserted. We should make the most of this while we can. I hear the central market is exceptional, and there is an ancient mosque I would love to see.

And so they head out, truly living the facsimile of a family on an unconventional holiday. The city is beautiful in a way Will had only ever seen in films, a kind of organic place you could never imagine was anything other than ancient, like something grown by nature and adapted to human needs. The city circles out like rings in a tree, surrounded by walls that delineate the upper size limit by how much the water supply can support. The desert stretches out, giving the impression that yes, they are at the edge of the world. There are even camels, standing around in groups like surly thugs guarding a street corner, ready to spring into action or spit in your eye soon as look at you. Will’s police instincts rise every time he sees them, but Abigail seems enchanted, and makes Hannibal promise to hire her one before they leave.

Her childish enthusiasm seems genuine, and even though he knows the secret of her terror and coping mechanism he cannot find fault with how she expresses herself. Then though, he sees the reflection of the way he looks at Hannibal, heavy with uncomplicated feelings and a molasses-dark undercurrent of something he doesn’t want to put name to. Perhaps for both of them, it is easy to act a kernel of the truth.

After a lunch prepared by the owner of the house that pales in comparison to Hannibal’s breakfast, they retire to their rooms for the extreme heat of the afternoon. Will tries to sleep, but his legs are aching from disuse and so take the opportunity to explore the villa. It is larger than most of the houses he had seen in the center rings of M’zab, but built carefully around a cool enclosed courtyard, sheltered from the worst of the sun. The villa is on one floor, but there are steps to the flat roof, designed to reflect off the worst of the sun’s rays. Hannibal’s room is between his and Abigail’s, her door left ajar. She nods at him when he puts his head round the door, and gives him a thumbs up. There is likely not going to be much opportunity for planning or heart to heart confessions, but he hopes that they can stay strong regardless.

There doesn’t seem to be much else to do, so he goes back to his room and picks a book at random from the shelf. It is an ancient copy of Gulliver’s Travels, well thumbed and disintegrating where the glued spine is failing, and he falls asleep barely two pages into it, drawn down by the siren call of siesta.

The sun sets abruptly at 6pm.

There is no slow fade in the desert. The sky is light, and then darkness descends and before you know it night has elbowed her way in. The city lights up slowly, until the glow of the electric lights pick out the grid between the circles of houses. The central market is a miniature sun, giving off a hum that echoed off the walls, sounding like a swarm of happy bees.

Hannibal had obviously not been sleeping during his siesta for there is a feast prepared for them when they join him in the dining room. Plates and plates of foods fragrant with cumin and other spices sit among drifting dunes of cous cous. In the centre, a large tagine sits looking like a steaming volcano ready to erupt.

It is delicious. Will cannot bring himself to ask what the meat is, but he is almost entirely sure it is goat. Abigail eats happily, rolling her eyes in obvious pleasure at the food and talking excitedly about visiting the market at night tomorrow. There is no wine, but the intensity of the meal still manages to make Will feel heady, like he’d had a few glasses on an empty stomach. He shakes his head when Hannibal asks him if he wants a nightcap, and retires to bed. Moving east as they are, he assumes that the jet lag and constant changing of time is what is affecting him so badly. Hannibal seems to take it in his stride, but he rarely sleeps, and by contrast Abigail sleeps any time she has the chance. In between them is Will, who tries to sleep and ends up feeling either drunk or wired, and then unexpectedly comatose, leaving him unable to be sure which day of the week the constantly moving night belongs to.

* * *

 

There is a power cut just as he has finally settled down to read.

It is easy to close his eyes and give in to the darkness and silence. M’zab is a never ending and ever moving city for all its ancient look. By day it is so loud, so chaotic and so for it to be finally silent is astonishing.

The lack of sound knocks his brain into familiar territory, suddenly he is so tired he can barely move. He was always used to absolute silence in Wolf Trap, barring the snuffling of the dogs and the creaking of the trees outside. He is asleep for probably something in the range of minutes but when he wakes feeling the kind of nauseous and groggy that indicates he was deeply under when he woke. There is a note and a thin blanket lying folded on his chest, which must have been the cause of his leaving sleep.

The note reads ‘come to the roof’. He debates going back to sleep and not giving into Hannibal’s weird whims of this fatalistic tour, but he is awake now.

He climbs the steps still in the traditional pajamas Hannibal had given him, his top half warm wrapped in the blanket, while the trousers are loose around his legs. The desert at night is cold, colder than he ever anticipated and it takes your breath from you in a cloud of smoke. Hannibal had warned him about it, but experiencing it is something else, like winter had suddenly descended like out of a fairy tale. As is the sight that greets him.

The sudden softness he feels underfoot when he steps off the stairs is the plush of the Persian rugs spread out across the flat roof of the villa. The rough grain of the untreated roof is undetectable through it. Every sense in his body is alive, awake, there is so much to consume. The stars are beyond anything in human comprehension. The city is boomingly silent in the grips of a power cut. There is the scent of the taif rose rising from the cut flowers and candles on the peripheral of his vision, just enough to highlight Hannibal lying on plush pillows in the middle of them. He is smoking a thin, handrolled cigarette that smells of vanilla and dark forests and looks like hedonism incarnate. Will assumes from the rustle of movement that Hannibal has turned to the sound of his arrival, the light from the moon and the stars and the candles is barely enough to see the look on Hannibal’s face as he rises gracefully to his feet.

There are a thousand reasons not to have this moment here, in a carefully prepared stolen boudoir under a pearl of a moon. It is pretentious and calculating, but he is reminded of what Abigail said to him. That the rules have changed, that they have to fit into Hannibal’s world, and rise to the tests he will give them until there is a true path of escape.

I see you like no one else does, he thinks, but does not speak aloud. The back and forth of their speech is like breathing these days, casual but crucial and occasionally belaboured. These thoughts that come to him are dangerous like the moment before everything goes black after you hold your breath a moment too long.

 

There is a thrumming beneath his skin and heart palpitations that feel like the rumble of thunder. He could be going sixty miles an hour with the energy that flows through him. The anxiety whispers like the dropping of copper coins in a silk bag. Like the feeling of something actively becoming lost before your very eyes.

Hannibal approaches him and suddenly gets him to look at the stars by grabbing his chin and forcing it up. The tapestry of the milky way is kind of like spilled chalk dust on black paper and at the same time utterly beyond his vocabulary. It glows with forgotten depths, speaking to something primal inside him. He feels dizzy, vertiginous, just looking into the void. It is akin to that feeling when falling asleep, when you start to feel like you are floating.

**  
** He looks back to Hannibal and knows his eyes are wet, but before he can say anything the thousand bulbs of the city lights up as the power comes back, and Hannibal’s head blocks out the light as he leans to kiss Will lightly, sweetly, as if theirs was a conventional seduction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the incredible response to the first chapter! I'm super excited to be writing this fic and your responses are key to me not getting distracted by other things.  
> I wouldn't be able to write this fic without airbnb and google maps, honestly the world we live in is incredible. I can look into people's houses? I can easy find out how fast it takes to get somewhere? The future is the lazy writer's dream. (I mean, Hannibal obviously has the power of teleportation, but I get annoyed when people travel long distances quickly. The world is huge!)
> 
> My main inspiration for writing the section in M'zab comes from [this article](https://fennchafia.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/only-rich-countries-can-aspire-to-develop-green-buildings/) which goes into the unique features of the city. As if I couldn't love the civilisations of the Sahara more, I learn about the pentapolis of M'zab. 
> 
> Come hang out with me on tumblr through my late-night blogging of writing this epic at [cicaklah.tumblr.com](cicaklah.tumblr.com)


	3. M'zab -> Venice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is dancing, sex and bad decisions. Not necessarily in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has finally earned its Explicit tag!

Hannibal’s kiss was the poisoned apple of fairy tale lessons long learned. It was the slice of blowfish by the inexperienced chef in an inescapable situation. Its the thrill of bungee jumping in a country where you don’t know the language. Hannibal is a man who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of pleasurable evil, who willfully consumes flesh of other humans in non-metaphorical circumstances, and for Will to take his kiss is beyond explanation by any mental illness known to the writers of the DSM. It is a true acceptance of the dark side of a psyche that should know better but decides not to follow its better nature. From the day he left prison and set the bait on the end of the line, Will knew that this very specific situation was possible.

When he had pictured it during his preparation, he had been sure it would be the kind of passion that could be mistaken for violence. He imagined that each touch Hannibal gave would leave his skin bruised, that his throat would play its part and leave him gasping for air. That Hannibal would bend him over an elaborately lacquered surface and be firm but fair, push inside him to exert dominance and take what he thought he wanted, what he ultimately had been manipulated to take. Will had been prepared for passion, for pain, for the shotgun crack of an orgasm pulled out by sheer will, concentration and biological imperative. Instead, there were the stars of the desert, the warmth of Hannibal’s body in the chill, the rough touch of silken hands that have taken lives, the taste of something that Will had never experienced before, the sheer experience of taking his pleasure from another male body a sensual novelty, as was the experience of having sex with someone who truly knew what they were doing. Everywhere Hannibal touched was an erogenous zone and Will was undone, responding to everything Hannibal threw at him, coming with his cock down Hannibal’s throat to the root, with three of Hannibal’s fingers massaging his prostate. His eyes, wide with orgasm and head thrown back, took in the majesty and his knees buckled. He ended up on his knees, face to face with Hannibal, now swollen lips and cheshire cat smiles.

Hannibal led him down the cool stairs, and laid Will out on the master bed. With a masterful hand that didn’t betray how incredibly desperate Will could feel he was, Hannibal guided him to brace his thighs together, and fucked between them in a facsimile of what Will had assumed would happen. It was a strange feeling, the friction of Hannibal fucking his inner thighs, bizarrely sensitive post-orgasm. The head of Hannibal’s cock brushed wetly against Will’s balls throughout his rutting, until, with a howl and a grunt that was decidedly inelegant, he came all over them. By that point, Will was surprised to find himself half hard again, and so let Hannibal jack him off with one hand full of spunk and the other gentle on his jaw, kissing him thoroughly through the most exquisitely torturous handjob of his life.

 It is possible, Will thinks in the aftermath, when he is lying in the remnants of their passion as the sun comes up, sticky and slick in strange places and with Hannibal dishevelled and dead to the world next to him, that it was the first time Hannibal had had sex with someone who knew all his secrets. He had a pang at that thought, that maybe Hannibal was giving him something real just as Will himself was resigned into graduating the persona of the sociopath’s apprentice behind to slip into another skin, one as well prepared for him by the Behavioural Science Unit as the one he is leaving behind.

He showers, nervy and jittery and too awake, and the water unheated by anything but the sun but perfect all the same on his sex flushed skin. It is cool and the pump is loud, and he meditates on the combination of the sounds of juddering pipes and rusty electrics, pushing out the thoughts that threaten to overwhelm.

When he drags himself out probably an age later, clean and wrung out, Hannibal had gone, and the doors and windows throughout the house are locked.

There’s no note on the pillow, but the bed is impeccably made and when he heads into the living quarters there is a simple breakfast laid out in front of the french doors. Abigail is up and picking at a bowl of fruit, a large mug of tea steaming at her elbow.

She looks up at him briefly as he sits down, before ducking her head.

To her credit, she times her first comment perfectly, just as he takes his first sip of coffee.

“I’m surprised you’re able to sit down, after last night”.

He chokes, coughing shallowly and drinks deep from the water glass.

“Abigail…”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing” she says loftily, hurt echoing through every word. “But he is dangerous, Will. You can’t forget that. I thought we were on the same page. He is more dangerous than you could ever think.”

She stands and smoothes down the wrinkles in her dress. “I’m starting to think you are too.”

He doesn’t so much see red but blue, a desperate, terrified sadness that she doesn’t understand what’s happening. He stutters ‘Abigail-’, at a loss of what else to say, but she obviously sees something in his face that confirms what she was hinting at and she goes white and bolts. He tries to catch her, tries to drop the act he had been living for far too long and appeal to the part of her that he knows was on his side just a few short hours ago. She evades him with a spark of terror in her eyes and runs fast enough that she is safely behind a locked door and pushing furniture in front of it by the sound of the scream of wood on marble when he gets there. He wants to knock the door down, hold her still and tell her everything about the plan that is bigger than her but that never expected her, about promises made to Jack Crawford that are all he has to hold onto these days. He wants to spill all his secrets and backup plans to her so she will feel safe, so that she will know. He doesn’t do anything of the sort. He goes back into his room, and opens a book, and waits.

Hannibal returns in a whirl of white linen and slick sunglasses. He barely notices the change in Will and Abigail, Abigail having moved the furniture away from the door, though she had not yet unlocked it, she does so when she hears Hannibal’s voice. She doesn’t look at Will. Hannibal comes with boxes, and a man Will has never seen before appears at his elbow with more boxes, boxes upon boxes of finery and extravagance. It is another skin to slip into, and they go like the snakes they are to change and pull on other identities.

There are documents too, already sitting in the breast pocket of a blazer, holding the secrets of a new life. The blazer is soft like baby blankets, a comforting thing made with care. Beneath is a sweater in off white, and the kind of jeans that would be appropriate in the presence of royalty.

He throws the dregs of his old life into a suitcase and puts on what Hannibal had bought him. It fits perfectly. Clothing like this would never dare not to.

Abigail steps out at the same moment he does. She looks like an off-duty goddess in a blue dress, looking older, but in a good way, her neck long and straight, her hair swept up and shining in the strong light. Will hears her smile to Hannibal and murmur ‘it’s silk’, sounding shy and pleased. He doesn’t hear Hannibal’s reply, but he does hear his chuckle.

He takes a deep breath and joins them. Hannibal is fastening a long necklace around Abigail’s neck, and he looks up at Will over her shoulder, hands braced on the wings of her shoulder blades as he smiles a private smile.

“Come”, Hannibal claps his hands, picking up an elaborate hat box from where it rested against his feet. “We must go before Interpol arrive. The plane is waiting.”

There is a tiny airport just outside M’zab, though airstrip would be more accurate. A sleek plane sits idling on the decaying tarmac. The desert stretches out in front of them and Will takes a moment to take it in, the enormity of it, how they came to the edge of it and still someone found them.

On the plane Will sits purposefully away from Abigail to give her space, and closes his eyes, letting the lurch of the plane escaping the pull of gravity drag him back into sleep.

 

* * *

He wakes a few hours later and realises he has no idea where he’s going.

Hannibal appears with a drink, a generous few fingers of whisky and several boulders of ice. He then leans down and places it at Will’s elbow, and kisses him.

It is a kiss that is meant to make a point, to calm, to placate. The kiss of language, not sex. The kiss of six months, of commitment, of conversations. A kiss of punctuation.

When Will opens his eyes Abigail is sitting in the seat opposite, looking inscrutable. Will wipes his mouth, self conscious. Hannibal sits down next to Abigail, and takes her hand.

“Abigail and I had a chat while you were asleep, Will. You don’t need to worry. Everything has been taken care of.”

Abigail’s stare held multitudes, but her lips said the lines she had been cast to play. “I’m sorry for freaking out, Will. I’m happy for you and Hannibal.”

He feels sick that he allowed this to happen - for Hannibal to have something of their shared vulnerability. He feels acutely the feel of sex upon his skin, the evidence Hannibal left behind despite the deluge. The panic rises, but he forces it down, and manages a wan smile at them.

The pilot thankfully cuts in, as Will wasn’t sure what his next line was supposed to be, announcing their descent into Marco Polo airport. Venice, Italy.

They are treated like celebrities at the airport, everything smooth and quiet and private. There are multiple private jets sitting on the tarmac, and it seems like they just slid in like cuckoo’s eggs amongst the high society. The three of them wear their sunglasses and are hustled through the back, to an abandoned customs hall with a single well dressed immigration officer, and into a private boat to take them into the city itself.

 

* * *

It is carnevale, the final hedonistic blow out before the solemnity of Lent. The streets are alive, thronging with several million people. Elsewhere in the city the celebrities and luminaries they snuck in with are drinking bellinis in Harry’s Bar and attending the fanciest balls, but the celebrations of the city’s populus pale before them. Normal people are in the streets, and everywhere is the promise of anonymity, of masked pleasure, hidden from the sight of God.

Their rented apartment isn’t the complete Rococo nightmare Will had suspected it to be, but there is an excess of gilding, and a piano that takes up a whole room, and three immaculate bedrooms with solid locks. There is a roof garden that looks out over the rooftops, and a balcony that situates it as near St Marks Square.

The travel and jet lag have ruined the passing  of time for him, and so it is only with the intense clamour of the bells that Will realises it is Sunday. It is briskly cold on the roof, but the distant water sparkles in the sun and there are signs of the intense life that makes up the city thriving below.

He finds Hannibal busying himself in the kitchen, checking cupboards and writing a list in his exquisite copperplate. Will slides himself up onto the work surfaces, which gets him a raised eyebrow, but nothing further.

“This place is beautiful, Hannibal” he says, idly opening the cupboard nearest his head, that turned out to be full of crystal glassware.

“This is one of my family’s homes, and so I can do with it how I please. It has been in the family for centuries. A distant cousin controls it, but he has never been interested in the news, even with mention of the family name.”

“Is it safe? Surely this will be the first place they will look.”

Hannibal touches his thigh absently. “Distant cousins are distant enough that we don’t share any real connections. The FBI would need advanced genealogists to make the connection between us. I believe we are safe, and wouldn’t bring you here if we weren’t. Do not worry, Will.” He says this with a smile, and then turns back to cataloging the spices in the rack.

Will wants to go find Abigail, but it's unlikely he’ll get anything out of her when Hannibal is in close quarters. He wants to go to her anyway, to hug her and tell her he’s sorry, and leave everything else unsaid. Her bedroom door is closed when he passes, and so he assumes she wants to be alone.

* * *

 

It is Tuesday, the day before lent begins and the most important day in the Venetian calendar. The Carnevale has been building since well before they arrived, but Monday approximately half the people Will saw were masked and today there are just a few unmasked faces moving among the crowd.

Over breakfast there is a smart double rap on the door, and Hannibal springs up and returns with two boxes, obviously hand delivered for their ostentatious wrapping and embossed boxes.

The first is for Will, a pure white silk mask with black eyes, lips and perfectly round circles on the cheeks and forehead. A tapered black hairline fades the edges out. It feels old, and when he holds it to his face it obscures his peripheral vision like a work-horse. Thick black grosgrain ribbon curls away, and he hears the scrape of the chair as Hannibal comes to tie it behind his head.

The mask barely fits, triggering a touch of panic at having so much of his sensory input removed. He whips his head around, and Abigail bursts into peals of laughter and applause.

“You look wonderful, Will.”

“Are you sure you won’t join us, Abigail” Hannibal says, his hands resting on Will’s shoulders.

She shakes her head. “I’ll stay here. You both deserve a night out.”

Hannibal undoes the mask to allow Will to finish eating, and unpacks his own. A plague doctor’s mask. It was at one point pure white, but its obvious age has left it with hairline cracks and darkening around the edges. but the long beak is intact, and when Hannibal holds it to his face and quirks his head sideways, he looks enough like a curious bird that Will can’t hold his laugh in.

They join the revellers early in the evening. Will refuses to wear the traditional outfit of Pierrot, the commedia clown, choosing to dress instead all in black, while Hannibal dons the cape of the plague doctor.

When they leave the apartment, Hannibal takes Will’s hand, and they step out together into the crowds.

The crowds are enormous and anonymous - everyone is masked. The majority are the cheap and gaudy Chinese replicas of the masks from famous paintings, but dotted around are masks that look like artwork, dripping in gold and sparkling with gemstones. Everything is open, and the tide is high. The crowds make it impossible to get into St Mark’s square, and the Rialto is dangerously overcrowded, so they melt into the crowd that surges through the side streets, taking in the sights and smells of the city in full revelry.

They end up in a small piazza that has more of a vibe of a neighbourhood block party than the formal tourist trap of St Mark’s. Hannibal buys them drinks from a tiny bar that is likely someone’s liquor cabinet pressed into active duty, and they try to drink without fully removing their disguises with limited success.

People continue to pour into the piazza over the next hour, until the crowd starts to reach the density that sets off Will’s long neglected policeman’s instincts. He turns to recommend to Hannibal that they leave while they still can, but finds that Hannibal is already occupied.

A loud Francophone man in a cheap half mask is standing too close, his red face indicative of too much beer and not enough self control. He is alone, and shouting about a spilled drink. People are looking in their direction and the woman on the other side of Will is muttering something Will doesn’t need to speak Italian to understand as secondhand embarrassment.

The man, who from his accent and slang Will thinks may be Belgian, takes Hannibal’s drink out of his hand and drains it. Champagne drips out the corners of his mouth as he takes in too much. The suspected Belgian then drops the glass, swears, and walks away.

The band strikes up again after taking a break, this time a slow, sad tune with a waltz rhythm and Hannibal takes a long moment to stare pensively at the Belgian’s retreating back, before taking Will’s hands and pulling him into a dance hold. It is too crowded really to actually dance, not that Will felt he could, especially since Hannibal’s mask is really not conductive to Will doing much but looking over his shoulder at the crowds, the way the beak jutted over his shoulder holding him in place.

Still, there is a magic in the air, and in the chill of the late winter night by the water it is nice to hold someone close, even if they are wearing a plague doctor disguise.

The song changes, and their embrace breaks along with the change in rhythm. Will cocks his head in the universal sign of ‘shall we get out of here?’ and Hannibal replies by holding his hands up in the reply of ‘give me a moment’.

Will watches as Hannibal walks up to the impressive bulk of the Suspected Belgian, putting a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. Hannibal puts out his hand for a handshake, and when the Belgian goes to take it, Hannibal plunges a knife below his ribs. The knife is blackened, a specialised tool for a sinister purpose, and slides in like the metaphorical through butter. The Belgian’s eyes widen as Hannibal drags the knife across, all the while shaking his hand. Hannibal moves away, pulling out the knife just as the band strike up a song that sends the Italian portion of the audience into a frenzy. They surge up towards the makeshift stage, and the Belgian is lost under the crowd. Hannibal walks up, grabs Will’s hand in a fluid motion and quick-marches them both out of the piazza.

They walk and walk, nonsensically weaving through tiny streets that are by each turn more and more sparsely populated.

They finally find a silent corner, lit by a single street light and the full moon, and Hannibal tears off his mask without undoing the ribbon. It clatters to the floor. Will pushes his mask up onto the top of his head and Hannibal takes this as an indication to move closer.

Hannibal stinks of blood, and his eyes are dialated like he is under the influence, but Will knows that he had barely half a glass of champagne. Hannibal’s hand is sticky where it is touching Will’s face, cupping his jaw, fingering the prominent ridge of his cheekbones. The tip of his little finger presses against Will’s mouth, and the movement forces Will to lick his lips.

Hannibal surges forward and kisses him with all the adrenaline in his body, pressing in hard, licking into his mouth, raking Will’s tongue with his teeth as Will kisses back. It is the ravenous, ferocious kiss of a predator half-starved, and Will is running on instinct more than anything else at this point. He feels the sticky press of Hannibal’s fingers dangerously low on his side, undoing his belt and freeing his cock from his trousers. Blood is the opposite of a lubricant, and so Will stands there with Hannibal holding his dick in one bloodstained hand and kissing him harder than anyone has a right to.

Will doesn’t want to be turned on, but he lets his weak knees take him down until he is kneeling on the cobbles at Hannibal’s feet in compulsive, sick, submission. Hannibal fists his hair and he looks up, and sees Hannibal’s ridiculous cape parted, and Hannibal undoing his belt, sees the spread of bloody fingerprints against the silver of the buckle in the moonlight, the evidence of this crime and what it has done to Hannibal. How much Hannibal truly enjoyed disembowelling a man in the middle of a crowded night. How easy that could have been Will, in another circumstance.

Hannibal feeds him his cock carefully, holding Will’s head in the right angle to be able to use his mouth the way he wants. It is a horrible facsimile of what Hannibal would do otherwise, a cannibalistic act accepted and celebrated rather than rejected and prosecuted. Hannibal has his hands pressed on pressure points, and it hurts, but the feedback loop of pressure, pain and pleasure, the sounds he can hear himself making are obscene and working for him, he is so disconnected from what is happening, floating half out of his body with sensation and the disconnection of what his life is like.

Hannibal pulls out of Will’s throat and comes against his cheek, his semen mixing with the smudges of the Belgian’s blood, taking the evidence away. The feel of it makes Will’s orgasm coalesce, and a couple of tugs with his clean hand and he is coming against the wet cobbles.

Hannibal produces a bottle of water from the depths of his cloak and uses it to wash the worst of the blood and semen off Will, and the blood off his hands. Down a tiny alleyway they find a gondolier taking a secret cigarette break away from the crowds, and him and his gondola scull them back to the apartment. It is an extravagance, and costs the best part of a hundred euros to go what is essentially two blocks, but sitting under the moon, with the city lit up brighter than he’d ever seen, like a thousand beautiful fires had been set in each and every piazza, it is truly magical.

Their apartment building has a mooring point, which is what saves them. Abigail is already on it, looking terrified and holding her shoes in her right hand.

“There are people banging on the door. They know we’re here. I don’t understand what they’re shouting but I think it’s Interpol. They’ve found us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my sincere apologies to everyone that this has taken as long as it has. Life kinda took over, but I beat it back down and so have time to write now. I was hoping to have this done before Hannibal came back...but its coming back in 3 days so I don't think that's going to happen! Therefore it'll keep going, but I won't be including anything from season 3, keeping this Mizumono compliant.
> 
> You should come hang out with me at [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


	4. Venice -> Moscow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Escapes, trains and revelations.

Although what happened likely only actually took a few minutes, to Will it seemed like time had slowed right down. Hannibal nodded at him, which Will immediately and instinctively knew to turn and grab Abigail as she launched herself off the dock and into his arms. The gondola rocked dramatically, and from behind him there was a crunch as Hannibal snapped the neck of the hapless gondolier. Seamlessly, Hannibal handed Will the pole, as he lowered the corpse of the gondolier into the water so that it slipped beneath the surface without a splash. He then took back the pole, and with a huge, brutal punt, Hannibal launched the gondola back the way they came.

They abandon the gondola where they had picked it up, away from any madding crowds. There, Hannibal drops his costume into the black waters, and Will follows suit. The canal eats the vintage masks with barely a splash.

Hannibal looks at Abigail sharply. “How did you get out of your room?”

“The door was misaligned, it doesn’t lock properly" she replies. "I thought you knew when you put me in there. I went for it when I heard the door go, on instinct, and it opened.”

Will senses there is defiance on the tip of her tongue. Her body language says what she isn’t able to say, that they are playing a game. That Hannibal is still not entirely sure he can trust her, even after a year of breaking her spirit, and that she knows this, and wants to say so. Against anyone else this would be when Abigail became an equal partner in their little tryst, instead of their doll, a prop, a pretty bird in a cage of her own mind.

He feels like he’s looking at her with new eyes, a winsome warrior princess facing off against the big bad.

Hannibal looks at her for a long second without saying anything. “It was not at the front of my mind,” he lies, “but it was fortuitous that it happened. They are looking for us. We need new disguises, and to get out of here as quickly and quietly as possible.

He takes out a handful of ghost-white plastic ties from his pocket, the kind law enforcement uses when handcuffs are too kind.

Will steps forward when he sees them, stepping in front of Abigail. “Woah woah, we don’t need those. We’ll stay here and wait for you.”

Hannibal responds with force. Will finds himself a second later with his face in the mildewed brickwork, his hands being bound tightly in the small of his back. Hannibal mutters “I do not have the time to deal with this, let alone enjoy this, so do what I say, Will. Or…”

There’s not even an ‘else’. Just the threat of a choice is enough.

Hannibal threads Abigail’s arm through the crook of Will’s and ties her hands in front of her. They look, in the dark, like lovers taking in the skyline, arm in arm.

When Hannibal’s hurried footsteps echo away down the alleyway, Will lets out the breath he didn’t even know he was holding.

“Oh god, Abigail. Oh god.”

“Shh” Abigail soothes. “It will all be fine, I promise. This wasn’t our time. He would always have caught us. The police won’t be able to find us, but Hannibal knows this place. Even the carnival would only have been a head start.” She sounds so sure that Will is convinced that she is talking herself calm.

“He isn’t omniscient, Abigail.”

“He is here, Will. There are eyes, and ears, and more eyes and ears. Just wait.”

Hannibal returns with a few of the cheap Chinese carnivale masks, the type that cover the full face. He doesn’t bother to undo the ties that bind them, but instead loops his arm through Will’s other side, and leads them three-abreast down a thousand side alleyways that shouldn’t by the laws of nature connect to each other. Perhaps Abigail was right.

It is early in the morning and starting to rain. The Carnevale is still going, and so the railway station is bustling with extra trains laid on for revellers getting home for work the next day. The Italian police are milling around, their tolerance for the party spirit flagging so close to dawn. Hannibal leaves them momentarily to go stand in a ticket queue, and then leads them onto the next train leaving the station, a shabby commuter half full of revellers and late-night staff returning home to the suburbs on the mainland.

Hannibal undoes them once the train is well out of the station, but the threat of ties remains. Both Will and Abigail remain cowed for the next few hours as Hannibal leads them through a web of trains across northern Italy, hopping off at stations that bustle with the beginning of rush hour, and then hopping onto new trains, back tracking as well as moving forward.

Eventually, at a larger station, Hannibal buys a second set of tickets and they instead join a smart, modern train in first class that is heading for Vienna. It is well after 9 in the morning, and Will is heady with hunger and overtiredness. His mask is still fixed to his face, and when he peels it away it makes an unpalatable noise from his sweat sticking to the cheap plastic.

The announcements are incomprehensible to Will, but he hears ‘express’ and ‘Wien’ and Hannibal’s sudden relaxation means that this is probably a train that won’t stop until they’re in Austria. He excuses himself to the tiny train bathroom, and washes his face as best as he can.

When he returns Hannibal is buying the contents of the food trolley, and there are pastries, chocolate and steaming hot coffee waiting for him. The initial mouthful of espresso causes his stomach to cramp, a gnawing pain of hot liquid on stomach acid and last night’s alcohol. His throat also hurts, and he blushes when he remembers why.

Hannibal sees his blush, and smiles. It looks like the Hannibal smile of days of yore, when he was just an eccentric footnote in Will’s life and not this trickster holding all the cards.

Hannibal manages to get a map off an attendant, and spreads it out over their table. It takes one day and twelve hours to get to Moscow by train, but it isn't as straightforward as that. In total, by Hannibal’s calculation, it will take five days before their little family unit steps out into Moscow's central station. Hannibal traces a line that snakes across from North Italy, through Austria and Poland, into Belarus and then finally into Moscow like an advancing army.  

They have a plethora of problems. The police will undoubtedly be on their tail, and will have worked out that they made it out of Venice. They would have locked down the airport, and so they would have only been able to leave by train, boat or by car, once they got out of Venice itself. Hannibal has his and Will’s fake passports, but Abigail’s passport is missing, and so a replacement will need to be procured. They also need clothes, cash and friends.

Hannibal spends the next few hours on the phone, speaking in rapid fire German to various people trying to solve their list of problems. Abigail naps, her breath slowing almost as soon as she closes her eyes and snuggles down into the upholstery. Seemingly a year of adrenaline means you lose the wired feeling and can sleep through anything, but Will is still in flight or fight mode. The croissant he choked down on top of the acrid coffee sits heavily in his stomach, which is too tired to actually digest anything of substance. He feels disconnected, not in the way he did during the worst of the encephalitis, but like he is unstuck from reality, floating just a bit behind himself, watching another Will Graham reread the names on the map Hannibal had circled over and over.

They get into Vienna Hauptbahnhof station in the afternoon. They have tickets on the sleeper train to Poland, which gives them time to meet with the shady Austrians Hannibal had been talking to all the way up from Italy.

Hannibal goes to hire a car, and while they’re standing around, suddenly Abigail bursts out laughing.

Will turns, and she points at the large, modern train sitting on the nearest platform. On the side, and on the signs on its dedicated platform, is emblazoned “Weiner Waltzer”.

Maybe it's because he had been awake 36 hours, witnessed two murders, and had an intense sexual experience with only a croissant and a cup of coffee to sustain him, but Will laughed until there were tears in his eyes. It was also from relief, it was so good to hear Abigail laugh and let go of her thousand yard stare, seemingly snapping back into being an ordinary girl for a few minutes.

Hannibal returns to find them clutching at each other, while worldy Viennese travellers rolled their eyes at the stupid American tourists losing it over a slightly stupid name.

He ushers them out and into the backseat of a comfortable BMW, and something in the release of his laughing fit means Will finally drops off into sleep, leaning on Abigail’s shoulder as she strokes his hair.

Its dark when he wakes, but that means nothing this deep into winter. Hannibal and Abigail are gone, and the car is parked in what looks like an empty anonymous concrete parking garage, the kind of place where mafia hits go down. The lights of the city twinkle in the distance through his sleepy eyes.

The car is locked, and his wrist is delicately zip tied to the male end of the seatbelt. It gives him some movement as far as the mechanism will stretch, but there are childproof locks on the rear doors and he doesn’t have enough movement to get any leverage on the front handles. After several minutes of stretching and attempting to gain some kind of control, he slumps down, defeated.

He was hoping that by now he would have had a chance to send some kind of message home. His dogs would have been taken care of, a man keeps friendly with his neighbours for this kind of eventuality. Well, maybe not this exact one, on the run with his lover, a cannibalistic serial killer with a tabloid friendly rhyming name, and their suspected dead stolen daughter. People in wolf trap love animals as much as they eschew gossip.

He feels groggy still, unable to get funny awake but unable to sleep from being distractedly thirsty. There's a bottle of water and a chocolate bar just within reach on the drivers seat - likely Hannibal's plan to make sure he was aware of how he restrained.

The car is cooling as the night deepens. He wants to stay awake and try and formulate a plan, but the water and bone deep exhaustion pulls him down.

He jerks awake from impossibly deep sleep as Hannibal and Abigail return. Abigail is shouting 'its fine, go, go!' As Hannibal throws the car into gear and they speed out, flying down the ramps out into the wide streets of the city. Abigail is craning her head to stare out the back window, but no one seems to be following them.

She squeeze his hand. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, Mom" he attempts to rib back, but it comes out more pathetic than sarcastic.

"Well, hold on. We're going to have to run for the train. Escaping the police means we've cut it pretty fine."

"They tracked us here?"

"Hannibal thinks one of his contacts tipped them off. When we picked up the passport there was a van nearby, it looked exactly like something out of a cheesy cop film. Tinted windows, satellite dish on top. Indiscreet. I went in alone but it was hard as I don't speak German and so Hannibal had to speak to them on the phone, but I got it and they didn't see Hannibal. We walked as far as we could but they don't seem to have followed us."

She slipped the new passport out of her pocket. "Do you think it's a good picture?"

She looks dangerous, the scar on her neck and missing ear standing out against the contrast of her dark hair and the white background.

"It's better than mine" he croaks. His throat is still too dry.

Hannibal passes a Swiss army knife back to Abigail, followed by a bottle of water. "Untie him, were almost there".

 

* * *

 

 

There is such romance around the concept of a sleeper train across Europe, but the reality doesn’t live up to this hallowed image. The Chopin leaves Vienna just after 10pm and winds its way at 200 kilometres per hour through the Austrian landscape until around dawn it crosses into Poland, stopping first at Krakow and then an hour later at Warsaw. The sleeper carriages look more like a line of evidence lockups than the Hilton. Inside are two moderately comfortable bunk beds, a private bathroom, and not much else. The edges of the beds are cushioned with soft plush carpet in the ugliest cheap motel print you can imagine. Imagining Hannibal Lecter lying on something so truly hideous brings a warmth to Will’s chest.

To his surprise, he and Abigail are rooming together. Abigail takes the top bunk, and for all their ugliness the narrow beds are comfortable. He averts his eyes as Abigail snaps the sales labels off her new pajamas and dresses for bed, but he can feel her eyes on his back as he pulls off his clothes, revealing more than he ever wanted to show to her emotionally. His own new sleep clothes are slightly scratchy, but he is so tired nothing really registers.

Hannibal comes in just as he’s dropping off to sleep despite the fluorescent light above still being on. There’s a scuffle, and then Abigail goes silent. As he rouses, Hannibal bends down and kisses him softly, while sliding a needle into his upper arm. The sadly now familiar feeling of being drugged into unconsciousness takes over from the soft warmth of natural sleep. Hannibal is talking to him throughout, but he can’t understand a word before the heavy blackness overtakes him.

They eat breakfast in Warsaw, the sun barely risen when Hannibal drags them, bleary eyed, from the train. Hannibal collects the tickets first, neatly printed with their mid-afternoon departure time to Moscow. They were making better time that Hannibal had originally planned for them, but this was perhaps the most vulnerable they have been. Anyone following them would probably have worked out that Moscow was their ultimate destination, with the best chance of finding somewhere new to settle being with the old enemy. Hannibal was known to speak Russian, and Baltimore society would have known that he liked to keep his hand in with all his languages by engaging with native speakers amongst the hoi polloi.

Abigail looks yearningly at a poster for the tour of the old town, but over more cold meat than Will had ever seen at any meal, let alone breakfast, Hannibal dictated that they would be spending the day in the normal parts of the city.

Downtown shopping in Warsaw gives Will the strangest sense of culture shock. It was remarkably similar to shopping in Baltimore itself, the shops, with their almost intelligible signage felt like being in a migraine, everything just wrong enough to give him a headache. He felt a strange disconnection, like he could just step out, turn left and find his car there.

He holds Abigail’s bags as she shops, Hannibal always nearby watching him. It felt just that little bit normal, and there was no sign of police. No one gave them a second look.

They returned to the station in good time for their 4pm train. Hannibal lets Will go to buy a coffee, and turns his back nearly casually as Will walks away from him. The urge is to bolt. There are a thousand people around, he could start shouting. Someone would speak English. But this is was so obviously one of the tests Abigail warned him of that he feels paralysed with second, third and fourth guesses at his every movement.

The women in front of him in the queue is ordering a decadent hot chocolate, laden with cream and biscuits. He orders one for Abigail, plus an over-boiled coffee each for him and Hannibal. When he returns, Hannibal’s face doesn’t betray anything, which in itself ties Will into knots at a potential lost chance.

They are waiting for the platform to be announced when Hannibal gets a peculiar look on his face. His head whips round to scrutinise the huge departure board, and then he stalks off without a word. He returns, moments later, gripping a new handful of tickets. “There’s been a change of plan” he says, picking up a bag and stalking off towards a far platform.

Will and Abigail, juggling their own bags, trail after him. They get on a train that’s heading for Sestokai, somewhere Will has never heard of. They sit there, in pregnant silence, as the Moscow train’s platform is called. The doors close, and the train they’re on pulls out of the station.

Hannibal exhales heavily, and looks out the window.

“Hannibal?” Will ventures.

Hannibal murmurs “yes?”, but doesn’t look around.

“Where are we going? We’re here with you, but it’d be good to know.”

Hannibal turns round to face them. He looks uncertain for the first time since Will nodded, all those weeks ago back in his blood drenched kitchen. It feels like a lifetime ago.

“We’re going home, Will. My home. Lithuania.”

 

* * *

Poland trundles past, the sun setting over the late winter fields. Occasionally there are fields full of pigs, happily rooting in the half frozen ground. The conductor comes round, followed a few minutes later by a man selling sandwiches and strong tea. Abigail busies herself looking at a stack of fashion magazines she’d insisted on buying despite their being in Polish. Will tried to distract himself with the only English book he could find in the large bookshops, a shiny covered thriller written at a seventh grade level. All the while, Hannibal stared out the window, drinking in the countryside, an unreadable look on his face.

They change trains at Sestokai, and an hour later get off in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Hannibal manages to hire a car from the terminally bored teenager in the office, and drives them a short distance into the nearest town. Its dark and foggy, the trees dense and verdant despite the scattered white of snow lying on the verges. It feels very pagan, like they’ve entered a dream. The trees part, and the town lies asleep at their feet. They check into a hotel, and Will watches Hannibal slip into his mother tongue like he had never left. Hannibal gets two rooms, and absently hands Abigail the key to one, before gesturing Will into the adjoining room with him.

They hadn’t touched since the night in Venice. Will had felt like he was in a dream all since then, travelling hundreds of miles as little more than ambulatory luggage for all he knew what was happening. But here, in this room, suddenly he feels back in control.

Hannibal sheds his clothes, exposing his terrifying vulnerability more and more as pieces of his suit drop to the ground. Will steps in as Hannibal begins to unbutton his shirt, and takes over. His fingers are thick, and undressing a man is curiously different from undressing a woman, like a mirror image. Hannibal kisses him lightly, and then shrugs out his shirt and pulls Will, fully dressed down with him into the bed.

They kiss, exhausted, for a long time, hands wandering but not going any further than some languorous necking. They fall asleep still in a kiss, lights still on and still mostly dressed. It is the best sleep Will has had since they left Baltimore.

In the morning Hannibal still seems out of sorts, and checks them out of the hotel after a distracted breakfast that again was mostly pork and pork byproducts. Then, arm in arm in arm, they head out into the town.

The town is Druskininkai, and it is beautiful, all carefully manicured parks and beautiful architecture. It is a spa town, and so now entirely touristy but full of the deep, unremarkable history that all of Europe wears casually, like its no big deal. Hannibal takes them to a florist and buys a modest bouquet of white roses at an extortionate markup, and has a brief conversation with the florist that he neglects to share with Will and Abigail. He walks ahead of them, and Will takes Abigail’s hand as they walk along the winding, picturesque streets until they reach a pretty onion-domed church in a leafy suburb.

The graveyard is well tended, and it takes Hannibal less than five minutes to find what he was looking for. A large, modest grave, marked with three names, tucked in the shade of an ancient tree.

Abigail goes to move forward and join him, but Will holds her back, letting Hannibal have his moment. Hannibal is talking low and intensely in his mother tongue, not intended for the ears of anyone but the dead. He wipes his eyes efficiently as he stands, and then deliberately places the bouquet on a grave two down from his family to avoid suspicion.

They go to the car in silence. Will sits in the front, and Hannibal loads their luggage into the car, and then drives off. They join a main road, and the signs indicate that it is 100km to Vilnius, but they barely have a chance to get comfortable before Hannibal is pulling off the road again.

They stop at what seems to be a deliberately shabby amusement park. It is a weekday, and the middle of winter, and so theirs is the only car in the capacious car park. Hannibal buys tickets from another bored teenager who could be the twin of the one who rented them the car, and they head in through a rickety turnstile.

It is a sculpture garden, imposing figures standing among manicured lawns and pruned back bushes that in the spring will undoubtedly flower. Red flowers, by Will’s guess, as every sculpture is a face out of soviet history. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin stand tall over them as they stroll through the gardens. A heroic cosmonaut, regional leader or profligate miner give some variety to the faces, and there is the occasional large installation of revolutionaries overthrowing their oppressors, but the majority of faces are stern soviet statesmen looming paternally over sweet flower beds and carved wooden benches.

They sit beneath a statue of Lenin that the label, in three languages, declares used to stand in the centre of Vilnius town square.

“I remember this statue from when I was a boy”, Hannibal says. “It always used to scare me. My father used to say that Lenin was watching us, and that we had to behave and stay close to him. I think honestly he just was scared to lose us in crowds.”

“If you’re from Vilnius, why are we here?” Abigail asks.

“My parents managed to keep the family home thanks to their influence. My father was a party bureaucrat and my mother a doctor. Sadly, her health was never good. She had suffered greatly during the war as a child, and her lungs had never recovered. Vilnius had terrible air then, so when she had an episode we would come as a family to the family home so she could recover. That kind of freedom was a rarity.”

Hannibal rubs his hands together, having left his gloves in the car.

“The last time we came, it was around this time of year. It had been a mild winter, but once we arrived a cold snap led to a blizzard and suddenly we were up to our necks in snow. No way to get out. I remember my father’s calmness, and the radio forecasting that the snow would pass quickly. We had some food, and Mother seemed to be doing better, so Father encouraged us to make a game of it. My sister Mischa and I played hide and seek through the house every night before bed. She always hid in the same place, so I managed to do a lot of exploring to drag out the time before I went to go find her.”

He smiles at the memory.

Will aches to ask the question that threatens to burst from his lips, but Abigail beats him to it.

“How did she die?”

Hannibal takes a deep breath, and Will is about to cut in and excuse her, apologise for prying into something that obviously hurts, when he starts to tell the story.

“One night, a group of men were drawn to the lights of the house. They were fleeing Poland after some political nastiness, and were brutes. Scared, but violent. Father and Mother tried to reason with them, and gave them everything of value they had, but they wanted the house and Father wasn’t going to give them that. So they shot both of them, right between the eyes. Mischa and I heard it, and went to hide. We hid in my mother’s dressing room, Mischa’s hiding place, behind the folds of her long dresses. Mischa didn’t know what was going on and was scared, but she was good, such a good girl, and kept quiet. The men were tearing through the house, looking for things of value. We were lucky, one of them tore open the wardrobe we were hiding in, but obviously wasn’t interested in women’s clothing, and so slammed it shut again without checking anything. But the act had stirred dust, and poor Mischa had inherited Mother’s sensitive sinuses. She sneezed, and we were discovered.

The men didn’t really know what to do with us at first. I heard them arguing in Polish, which I didn’t speak more than a few words of at the time. But they spoke Russian badly, and I had always excelled at Russian in school, so I tried to buy us time, and think of a way out.

They had eaten all the food we had left in one huge gluttonous meal, and wanted to know if we had any more. They were obviously still starving and the forecast had changed and another blizzard was on its way. They were obviously panicking, and not wanting to give up their prized house and the safety it provided. I didn’t want to help. I had heard them shoot my parents, and could see the blood on the floor where they’d dragged their corpses from the room.

Mischa was crying and they were arguing between each other in Polish and shouting at me in Russian. She was only four, and had no idea what was going on. I couldn’t comfort her as they had me trapped on the other side of the room. One of the men moved to punch another over the food, and the leader rolled his eyes, pulled out his handgun and shot Mischa between the eyes. “Now we have food” was what he said. I remember everything, down to the tone of voice, his high snarling tone. How pleased with himself he was.

They survived the storm, and left when the weather changed three days later. I must confess I have few memories after they shot my sister. Once they left I walked into town, and someone contacted my Uncle.”

“I never thought I’d come back here” Hannibal finishes. “I haven’t been back since I was a boy. My Aunt and Uncle lived in the capital, and after the death of my parents and what happened to Mischa my Uncle never wanted to come back. He wanted to burn the place to the ground. I had occasionally looked at pictures, or given into the folly of looking at maps and tracing my boyhood walks, but when I saw the station announcement for the nearest border town I was...impulsive. It was dangerous to come, but I can’t really bring myself to regret it.”

Abigail was failing to hold back the tears streaming down her face. She hugged Hannibal, there beneath the statue of Lenin, a full body hug.

They sat, the three of them, on the bench until it started to snow. Will felt that something fundamental had changed, but it would take time to understand exactly what.

**  
** A day later, they finally stepped off the train into Moscow’s central station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am really obsessed with trains, if you didn’t catch that! The murder family’s path across Europe is actually fairly accurate. This is entirely down to the amazing website [The Man in Seat 61](http://www.seat61.com/index.html) which is a train obsessive’s dream. The soviet statue theme park is also real. Its called [Gruto Parkas](http://www.grutoparkas.lt/?lang=gb), also known as Stalinworld, and one day I will finally visit (though its not as well manicured as I’ve described it. Fullerverse Stalinworld would definitely have red flowers in bloom.)  
> This is now officially the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my two dissertations. So go murder fam! And thanks to everyone who has subscribed and given feedback, it is all greatly loved and appreciated.


	5. Moscow -> Beijing

Where their train journeys through Western Europe were fraught, Moscow had the familiar griminess of the large American city but with architecture that was dream-like. The onion-like domes of Orthodox churches were common sights in every neighbourhood, and the cyrillic alphabet was entirely alien to Will's American mind. Where on the way there Will could at least read the words if not understand them, here it was different. He felt, for the first time, utterly foreign.

Hannibal checks them into a bland, American style hotel in a far suburb near a convention center. They have a family style room, one ostensibly for Will and Hannibal, and the other for Abigail, but Hannibal is again making spur of the moment plans in rapid fire Russian, and so Will and Abigail spend three days sleeping, ordering room service, watching dubbed episodes of Friends  that Abigail knows by heart on the television, and looking out of the window on to the grey, anonymous street below.

Then, as abruptly as they arrived, they are moving again, to another hotel. This time, Hannibal has a separate room on a different floor, and Will and Abigail’s room opens out onto a wide garden. It is bitterly cold, too cold to snow, and the ground is frozen solid even this late in the season, but they spend as much time outside as possible.

“These tests of loyalty are getting tedious” Will sighs, rubbing his hands together in his wool gloves. They make an unpleasant rasping noise but they are the warmest thing he’s ever worn.

Abigail is balancing on the narrow edges of the flowerbeds, arms out like a tightrope walker. “It’s good though. He does it when he remembers we are here. He is distracted. There were definitely times in the last hotel we could have escaped, if we’d wanted to.”

“Are you kidding? Why didn’t we go?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Abigail.” he tries again. There is something in Will that wants her to say it.

“Let it go Will. The first two times I only realised after that it wasn’t a test. I don’t know if he would be negligent again.”

“But if you see it again, that sign, will you run?”

“Probably. But he knows I want to escape, so would I get far? He probably would take my feet this time. He’d probably get you to hold me down. He’d enjoy that.”

She comes to stand in front of him. “If I see an opportunity, and it’s the right time, I’ll take it. But beforehand, I’ll do this -” she raises her hands in the three fingered scouting sign. “You were a scout, right, Will? If you see it, just walk. Don’t walk the same way as me. We go separate. He can’t physically be in the same place at the same time. So we scatter. We make our odds the best we can."

She sits down on the bench, and puts her head in her hands, sighing heavily.

“Its nice to think these things. This is my tenth plan. The first plan was to kill him. The second was to go along with it. The third was after he bought up you, and then it was to run away with both of you, and then escape when you weren’t looking. But then I learned he is always looking. After that it was just murder fantasies. Or fantasies that he was right, and living on a boat somewhere. Then breaking out in Venice, and running away, but the Embassy is closed on public holidays, and I don’t trust the police. He is too charming, he’d walk in, telling some story about his poor daughter with her paranoid delusions and walk straight out with me. There was never a mark on me, and the police can be so short sighted about abuse if there aren’t bruises. The number of times they sent my Mom back to my Dad. I saw though. I learned.”

Will takes a moment to muse. “You’ve never stopped fighting.”

Abigail doesn’t smile, she doesn’t take the compliment. It feels like he’s never said a correct thing to her in the whole time they’ve known each other. “No, the key was I never started fighting. Hannibal knows me, he knows that I freeze under the flight or fight response. He knows that to win, he only has to threaten me and he has me wherever he wants me. The only reason we both are still alive, you and I, is because we don’t do what sensible people do. Your response is to run, but you and Hannibal are like flocking birds. You always seem to go in the same direction.”

There isn't much for him to say to that.

The sun sets, and Will and Abigail settle in for the night, the TV in English for once, although the entire bottom third of the screen is taken up by subtitles. The film is a generic action thriller, and Will falls asleep half way through, Abigail’s words ringing in his ears.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal has them on the move again the next day. He announces over breakfast that it is time to move on, and has them packed, checked out and into the car in less than an hour.

Will is surprised that he takes them back to the central station - he had expected that Russia would afford some kind of protection and they’d be able to fly, or lie low for a bit. Instead, they sweep into the station and are met by a smiling man who both recognises them and addresses them in immaculate English.

“You’re lucky Doctor Norkas, you have just missed Chinese New Year, so the train has some reservations left. First class, as you wanted. You must rush though, the train does like to leave on time.”

“Thank you Kristov”, Hannibal smiles, his professional smile woken up from its long slumber. “My family and I thank you, the embassy will compensate you for your time and the inconvenience you’ve been through.” Kristov bows and disappears, but Will catches him looking over his shoulder at them a final time, a disgusted look on his face.

They rush to the platform to find a train quite unlike the smooth and sleek trains that brought them through Europe. Its cheerful if outdated, with a decidedly soviet feel, and as they find their reservation, each carriage proudly displays Пекин - Улан-Батор - Москва in Cyrillic, and what Will assumes is the same in Chinese underneath.

“Is this the Orient Express?” he asks?

Hannibal looks up and down each carriage as they pass, barely missing a step as he explains. “Despite the name, the orient express ran from London to Istanbul. This is the Trans-Mongolian railway. Six nights to Beijing across Siberia, the Mongolian Steppe and the Gobi Desert. The only way to travel. Come, we are leaving.”

Will stops in his tracks. “China?”

Hannibal stops a few feet in front of him, holding Abigail’s hand. The tension in his body is visible.

“Yes”, he says, simply. “And we will not talk about this here.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to China” Abigail pipes up.

“As have I” Hannibal says. “I regret that I never made it there in my youth.”

Hannibal strokes Abigail’s arm, and then steps back to Will, who is still stopped still in the middle of the platform. Their fellow travellers stream past them, glancing at their tickets every few seconds as if their reservations were going to change.

“Do not do this now, Will. Not when we are so close.”

Hannibal picks up Will’s bag, and takes his arm roughly with his other. Will considers making a scene, but while his body is rejuvenated from his recent rest, his mind is still skipping like a fishing line attached to a whale, reeling away into the dark.

 

* * *

 

The cabins are not as nice as they were on the other sleeper. The first class carriage has a samovar of hot water at each end, the rooms fitted with soft bunks and a private bathroom, if all a little too functional to be in good taste. They’re small, smaller than Will can deal with right now. Hannibal stashes Abigail next door, and then comes in and locks the door behind him.

It is the first time they’ve been alone since Lithuania. Outside, the suburbs of Moscow give way to farmland as the train picks up speed. Will sits heavily on what will later fold out to be his bunk, and stares out of the window as fallow fields and industrial towns speed past. Hannibal busies himself unpacking their things into the cupboards, then pokes his head out of the door and speaks to the attendant in rapid Russian. He returns with two cups of strong black tea, one of which he presses into Will’s hands. He realises he’s shaking, despite the stifling warmth of the carriage’s heating, he cannot get warm in himself. He feels trapped, shaking apart, alone in every cell of his body. Regret, rather than blood, pumps through his veins. Panic, an old friend long thought forgotten, tries to creep back in through forgotten back doors.

Hannibal sits down next to him and takes him into his arms. He smells warm, and of the stale cigarette smoke the men in the hotel stank of, but on Hannibal it is rough and spicy rather than nauseating. Will slows his breathing, letting himself get lost in the proffered comfort for a stolen moment.

Despite this, the gremlin of Will’s anger remains unsated. A hug, a few stolen kisses, and a cup of tea do not undo the multitudes of his feeling. The contentment burns off like morning fog under summer sun, and he pushes through it. He pushes Hannibal away, genuinely surprising him to the point where he loses his balance, only just managing to catch himself on the frame of the seat.

“Do you even have a plan, Hannibal? Or are we just going to sit in tin can after tin can until Interpol catch up with us?"

Hannibal looks momentarily hurt, but Will continues. "Won’t they know we’re here? This isn’t a non-stop service to Beijing. Or was that the plan? Is this our final hurrah? Are you planning on going out in the blaze of glory? What is to happen to Abigail and I, Hannibal? Have you ever thought of what I have given up to be with you? You’ve kept me drugged so I don’t know my own mind, lied to me, kept me in the dark, both physically and metaphorically. You’ve tied me up, pushed me to my limits, you’ve blown my mind, oh god, but you haven’t said anything of substance. I ran away with you because you make me feel things I have never felt before, because against my better judgement-" he pauses, pushing the next part through gritted teeth "-I _want_ you, I want you more than I wanted normality. I want you and Abigail and I don’t want all of this to be for nothing. This can’t be a wasted opportunity. I want more than to see the world from a train window, before I spend the rest of it behind bars.”

The sun is setting outside of the train window, the low, orange winter sun. Their cabin looks like it is engulfed in flames.

Hannibal sighs. “I am not an easy man to love, Will. No one has done so for a long time. Not the person I am beneath the layers that have built up. But I let you see me, and you see me, but I can never be sure if you understand what it means to love what you can see.”

They are close. Hannibal looks haloed with fire against the setting sunbeams streaming through the window.

Will swallows. “You say that, but look at me. Do I look like someone who does not love you? I want you to do what you will. I _want_ there to be no pretenses between us. We are partners. I want you to stop protecting me. To let me be hurt. To trust me enough to love me.”

Hannibal hesitates a final moment before he reaches out and puts his hands on Will. In all honesty, it feels like the first time.

He is not gentle. The encounter in Venice had been rough, but there was nothing on this. This was Hannibal the predator, Hannibal the criminal, Hannibal the devil’s incarnation, but this wasn’t the carefully negotiated brutality in a BDSM scene. They fought, first. Not for submission; Will knew that he was going to take Hannibal and that was part of the challenge. It was a honest-to-god fight, like a continuation of what had gone down in Hannibal’s kitchen. Blood was drawn, clothing ripped. Hannibal’s strong teeth closed in on Will’s shoulder and Will instinctively dropped like a stone, wiping Hannibal’s feet from under him. Once they were both on the small square of rough carpet between the seats, Hannibal bleeding from the nose and a gash on his hairline and Will’s teeth mottled with blood, they kissed, first a continuation of their fight, and then it changes, metamorphs, until Will ends up with Hannibal’s entire weight resting on his upper body as he sits on his chest, cutting off the intake of breath.

His vision goes grey at the edges, but he doesn’t panic. Hannibal steps off, and flips him, subdued from lack of oxygen, his knees tucked up under his chest and arms arranged uselessly on the floor beside them. Will hears the contents of his toiletries bag being upended onto the dusty floor, and there’s the lube, the unmistakable click he associates with long, lonely nights plagued with insomnia when occasionally a perfunctory jerk off session might confuse his brain to let go enough to sleep. Hannibal smears it cold and greasy around his hole, exposed and semi-relaxed from the position pulling his muscles just so, and doesn’t bother with the preamble of safe and sane sex and just presses his prick hard against it and bullies his way inside.

It burns but Will knows he can take it. And he does, the stars aligning. The sway of the train helps, as does the way Hannibal waits for just a moment long enough at the bottom of his initial thrust before putting all that power behind the next. Will’s knees grate along the cheap carpet, his palms uselessly lying by his side, twisted up into nothing more than stabilisers for Hannibal’s pleasure. Will’s dick is trapped in the tight, humid press of his own flesh, his thighs and belly firmly encasing it from all sides.

The fucking is causing him to yelp with every thrust, Hannibal fast like an inhuman thing, like porn on fast forward. It is a sprint of a fuck, something designed to burn out quickly. Hannibal’s hands thread through his hair, tight against his scalp, and he pulls to get more leverage and lift Will up just enough that he can’t quite get off against himself. The battering ram attack on his prostate is too much, putting him in a place somewhere beyond orgasm, where tears prick at his eyes and his prick burns hot and tight, like he’s been edged for hours instead of mere minutes, insensate, half crazed, rubbed raw and flayed open.

 

Hannibal screws in one final time so deep the press of his hipbones against his muscles are sharp enough to register as actual pain, and comes hard into him. The combination of the pain, the sudden drop as Hannibal lets go of Will’s hair and the sensation of being ejaculated into is almost enough, but it isn’t until Hannibal pulls his rapidly softening cock out of Will’s sore, abused ass, that he finally comes, whimpering into one hand as the other flays his dick near raw, his orgasm a pathetic, overstimulated thing that leaves him still hungry but entirely drained.

Will lies on the floor, naked and exposed as Hannibal dresses and tidies their cabin, humming to himself. Then he gives him a hand up, pushes clothes at him, and then once Will is dressed, slowly feeds him a glass of tepid water, stroking his hair. They don’t speak. Hannibal scrubs the semen stain from the carpet while Will stares out the window as the final rays of sunset disappear over the horizon.

They go for dinner in the dining car. The meal is heavy on the meat, root vegetables and cream, dumplings and potatoes and vegetables next to huge slabs of well cooked protein. Abigail joins them, chattering about the book she has just finished, and eating with gusto, either not noticing or noticing too keenly the dynamic between them.

She pauses and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Hey! I’m talking to you, you know.”

Will shakes himself and forces a smile. “Sorry, Abigail. I think I’m just tired.”

It is a lie. For the first time since they left Baltimore, he feels properly awake. Whatever drug that was in his system must have finally passed.

“You should go back to the cabin, Will” Hannibal says. “Abigail and I can look after ourselves. I wish to talk to some of our fellow passengers.”

Will nods, and leaves. He climbs into the top bunk, and stares at the ceiling for hours. He doesn’t hear Hannibal come in, so he figures he must have slept at some point.

 

* * *

 

The train snakes through Russia, stopping at towns that seem badly adapted to their post-soviet lives. Huge steelworks dominate the sky in some, while in others the tallest buildings are the onion-domed orthodox churches, and some are barely hamlets, with nothing taller than a chimney to break the line of the horizon.

Will spends his first few days days in the restaurant car as much as possible. There’s a man with a thick moustache who speaks no English but plays a mean game of poker, and they play for matchsticks and sugar cubes and an ever increasing bar tab of good vodka and terrible whiskey.

Hannibal comes to the restaurant car for mealtimes, but never talks to them. They could be strangers, for all they interact in public.

By night, he and Hannibal talk.

They have sex too, but the main thing is the talking.

 

* * *

 

 

The day before they are due to cross over into Mongolia, Hannibal makes an announcement.

The three of them are lounging in Hannibal and Will’s cabin, for a change. A large group of American backpackers had joined the train at Irkutsk, having completed the Siberian stopover of their Russian trip. They had taken over the restaurant car, making crass jokes about Siberian gulags and Soviet Russia, to everyone’s annoyance.

Abigail has found a stash of English language books left behind by previous tourists and is occupied with a copy of one of the Twilight novels, her face mostly bored as her eyes skip across the page. Will has dibs on reading it when she’s done.

Hannibal is writing, his perfect copperplate inscrutable from the angle Will is sitting at.

Hannibal interrupts the silence. “I suspect I have found the agent assigned to this train”, he says casually, as if mentioning he is going to have a shower. “I think I shall kill him tonight.”

Abigail throws her book down, losing her place. “What? They followed us? Interpol?”

“I suspect they have covered all the exit routes out of Moscow, but they cannot be sure or they would have taken us already. We are soon to leave Russia, and once we are in the desert it will be the perfect opportunity to dispose of the body and not leave a trace. By the time anyone will work out what has happened, we will be over the border and into Mongolia.”

“Do you think this is wise? They must have seen us by now. We’re still in Russia.” Will says.

“We will be in Russia until 10pm tonight. Therefore it must be done soon. There is a four hour stop between Mongolia and China, to change the wheels, therefore we must be careful.”

 

* * *

 

Hannibal deems that this needs to be a team effort, and so it is strange that the first thing that the three of them are actively engaging in on this trip is the willful murder of someone they have suspicion of following them.

His cabin is one of the third class four berth ones with the hard beds, cheap and readily available even at peak times. The cabin is quiet, the swaying of the carriage minimal as they cut a straight line through the Russian countryside towards the steppe and it’s impossible wide open space.

Abigail knocks on the door, and then once the mark answers the door, quicker than you can imagine, Hannibal snaps his neck. It is clean, and so uneventful it almost doesn't feel real. The man falls to the ground, naked but for an old pair of boxers so obscenely stretched out his prick and balls loll out onto the carpet. It is then, for some reason, that Will realises that the man is who he has been playing cards with the last week.

“No, no. No. Hannibal, this is the wrong man.”

Hannibal ignores him, gesturing to Abigail to take the feet.

Will repeats himself. He isn’t quiet. There’s a panic in his voice that he can taste. How strange that he was au fait with murder, how much has he changed? But nobody comes. The cabin remains silent and dark but for the sway of the train and the strange light of the moon.

Hannibal drags the body back into the compartment. It is empty, and so Will hopes that means no collateral damage.

The windows are small in the cabins, but the ones at the end of the carriage are just about big enough to fit the body through. They leave Abigail as watch, and drag the rapidly cooling and increasingly heavy corpse down to the end, careful not to knock the samovar as they open the window wide and feed his body out of it, inch by torturous inch. Will hears the corpse's bones break as he hits the ground, a horrendous crack and limbs splaying at unnatural angles. A broken neck could plausibly be part of this fall. Hannibal’s plan was perfect, as usual.

They go back to the cabin, and Abigail is leaving vodka bottles in the nooks and crannies of his bunk, in his bags. She goes through them, her face a line. There is nothing to indicate that he was a spy. There’s no mention of their names, no pictures. His phone is full of softcore pornography, some one sided text messages and nothing else.

They walk back to their rooms in silence. No one notices them as they slip through the restaurant car, a few sleepy patrons swilling clear spirits and staring out into the night. It is raining, slow and steady and just a shade above freezing.

Will doesn’t bother to make excuses. He considers following Abigail into her cabin, taking her spare bed and trying to sleep a dreamless sleep, but he ends up wedged into Hannibal’s bunk, pressed against his strong chest and sleeping the sleep of the complicit.

 

* * *

 

 

They hit Ulaan Baatar, the Mongolian capital, late in the morning. The American backpackers alight after a breakfast of too much vodka, their shoulders heavy with their overladen backpacks but light with responsibility. Abigail has increased her library to include all the Twilight novels, and is distracting them both by reading sections aloud. Will is thrilled, Hannibal pained.

They pass through Mongolia in a daze. Will is too alert, waiting for the alarm to be pulled, for someone to ask him if he’s seen his friend, but nothing happens. He passes the time teaching Abigail how to play poker, and then wipes Hannibal out of every ruble in his wallet when he scoffs that Will is teaching her the wrong approach.

It feels normal, like there isn’t blood on his hands and guilt in his bones. They feel like a family, with all the skeletons that that involve.

They arrive at the Chinese border in good time, with not even a whisper of suspicion on the wind.

 

The train systems in Russia and Mongolia follow the same proprietary gauge of rail, but the Chinese rail system uses the international standard, and so the locomotive and its carriages need to be fitted with a different set of wheels before they are able to join the Chinese mainline system. This means there is a mandatory, four hour minimum, stop for all passengers.

Erlien is a border town that feels like something out of science fiction, its different names loudly proclaiming the best things in town in best neon signage, whether that town be Erlien, Erenhot or Ereen depending on who is doing the transliteration. It also has a serious preoccupation with dinosaurs. Inner Mongolia is a fertile area for paleontology, and the nearby lake is the focus of it, and so huge statues of various locally discovered species loom at them as they roam municipal parks, proudly displayed and casting strange shadows in the inadequate city lights.

They eat for want of anything better to do, rice and miscellaneous meat and excellent spicy vegetables, and Will keeps an eye on Abigail as she plays a few hands of poker with some of their fellow travellers. She buys a postcard with her winnings showing the statues of the kissing brachiosaurus that welcome travellers coming up the highway, their long necks arching high over the freight that passes beneath them. Hannibal wanders around, but doesn’t disappear as usual in these liminal places where they are most vulnerable. He doesn’t even look at his cell. He keeps his nose in his book, an enormous tome in tight cyrillic type, which Will suspects is War and Peace. He can't really imagine Hannibal reading anything else at a time like this.

 

It is 2AM when the call comes that they need to reboard the train, and after a cursory glance of their Chinese visas by the latest in the succession of bored passport officers, they are away.

 

The Chinese train network is a highly functional modern marvel. Where a day previously they were hoisting a body through a window as the train chugged lazily across the desert, once over the border the speed picks up and they are in the outskirts of Beijing by breakfast. After a week of life changing cabin fever, they are finally off the train. The end of the line.

Hannibal checks them into the Hilton, an honest to god _Hilton_ , two adjoining rooms, no waiting. He takes Will into the shower the moment the door is closed, a hand on his elbow leading him and undressing him, pressed together like the normal kind of lovers. There is more space in the bathroom than they’ve known for weeks, and Will loses himself under the hot water and against Hannibal’s mouth, his fingertips barely touching the walls as he luxuriates in space, beautiful wide space.

They rut slowly on the clean, barely used bedding, damp skin cool under the air conditioning, and Will develops goosebumps as Hannibal swallows him down slowly, slowly, the warmth of his mouth so very, very clear. He comes with a sigh, and lets Hannibal fuck him lazily, not a thought in his head.

Despite the best attempts of the central air, they are sweaty again, so they return to the shower again, and then pick up Abigail and head down to get some food.

 

They are barely across the lobby when there is a shout. Someone points at them, some anonymous figure, his finger jabbing from across the lobby. The man is shouting in Chinese, and Will makes out Hannibal’s name in the stream of consonants. Hannibal does too, and he bolts like a sprinter out of the blocks. The security guards are only just registering something when they run past at full power.

 

They make it out onto the street. The Beijing traffic is dense, which should buy them some time. The possible sirens of the maybe summoned police cars are distant and indistinct, the afternoon gridlock a sluggish river of terrible fumes and worse drivers. There is no guarantee that this is real. They have been so lucky up until now, and why here, why in a Beijing hotel, is where they get caught? Why did their luck run out here?

They run, the three of them a daisy chain of linked hands and pumping legs, dashing between the crowds in the well-to-do pedestrianised shopping street to get ahead and cover their tracks. The adrenaline takes them blindly down alleyways that stink of rotten rubbish and over footbridges that cross the enormous, cacophonous expressway until it runs out, jelly legged and disoriented, in the middle of a crowded square.

Three is a terrible number for a getaway, too wide for sidewalks, too cumbersome for stairwells. There are sirens everywhere, and shouting in many languages. Someone collides heavily with them, someone else who is running for his life. Will is the one that goes down, hitting the concrete hard, knocking the wind out of him. Hannibal goes down after him, dropping too late to stop him being hurt. Then Hannibal springs up and starts shouting Abigail, Abigail, and grabs Will’s hand, pulling him up into the light.

Will looks up and fluttering above them across the square is the now unfamiliar sight of the stars and stripes, blowing in the poison breeze. In amongst the shouting is the mechanical clank of a security gate being locked, and there behind the gates of the embassy, is Abigail, being led away by a security guard. She turns, a final time, her face streaked with crocodile tears, and raises her three fingers up to him.

Realisation hits him like a truck. 

“She’s gone” Will says. “Hannibal, she planned this. We have to go. We have to go. She’ll be alright, but we have to go. We have to go now.”

  
And so, without looking back, hand in hand, they run.


	6. Beijing->Lamma Island

They stop running eventually, lungs burning with the dense air and it seems initially like no one had followed them. Hannibal drags them into the first hotel he finds, and mugs at the receptionist until she hands them a room key with a stoic expression that belies her irritation at stupid foreigners.

When the door closes, Will instinctively puts his hand in his coat pocket, and his hand closes on a folded scrap of paper.

Abigail had slipped a note in, reverse pickpocket style. Will stares at it, willing it to not be there, wishing it would burst into flames before Hannibal notices it, but the entrance vestibule to the room is smaller than the lift, and there’s nowhere for Hannibal’s eyes to go but after his.

Will unfolds it, and reads, silently engrossed.

> “Dear Will,
> 
> I know that Hannibal will read this so don’t bother hiding it from him if I’ve succeeded. If I’ve failed, then well, maybe together we can plan something better, if we survive. But I think this might work, which is why I decided to write this down.
> 
> There were so many ways this plan could have failed. If you and Hannibal hadn’t started a relationship, if you hadn’t been so easy to drug, if Hannibal hadn’t got jealous and murdered that man on the train, then the outcome would have been different.
> 
> I know it will be driving you both insane as to how I managed it, so pay attention: there was no Interpol in Venice on the night of the Carnivale. Neither was there anything suspicious about the van in Moscow, that I know of anyway. And I stole the cell phone off the man on the train.
> 
> This is good for both of you. There isn’t a foreign police contingency after you. If you move quickly, you can both get out of the country and away before it gets out that you are here. I promise I won’t give anything away for as long as I can. If the Chinese Bureaucracy does its job, you could be anywhere by the time Jack Crawford steps off the plane.
> 
> I will always love both of you, but don’t begrudge me taking this opportunity. I don’t want to be a footnote in your histories - I want a life for myself.
> 
> Please tell Hannibal that I appreciate all he has done for me.
> 
> Love always,
> 
> Abigail

Will folds the note up and passes it to Hannibal. He takes off his coat, legs suddenly weak. He needs to lie down.

Hannibal follows a moment later, the scrap of paper twisted in his long fingers.

“She played you”, Will says.

“She played the both of us” Hannibal cuts back. “Or did you know this was going to happen?”

They’re lying side by side on a narrow double bed in this cheap motel, a fan stirring the stale air while they can hear the muffled thumps of a couple fucking somewhere nearby. The bed still has the plastic on the mattress, and makes a disturbing rustling noise whenever they move, but the room is barely big enough for them to stand, let alone have a vertical conversation. Will can’t imagine having sex here, yet the whole place screams that the owners know all too well that this is the kind of place they are running, and applied the pragmatism of the horny and desperate to squeeze as many rooms as possible into their building.

“I knew she wanted to.” Will says eventually. Each breath hurts with the effort it takes to draw in. “We had discussed intentions, but no specifics. We never really had the chance.”

Hannibal rolls over onto his side to look at him. There’s a moment where he looks terrifying, but that is drowned out as the bed rustles like a thousand pensioners opening sweets in the cinema. Hannibal smiles instead, and for once it isn’t the smile of a predator.

“It seems we have a window of opportunity, my love. Where do you want to go? Where should we set our bow for?”

“I don’t know Asia well” Will says, comtemplating, trying not to think about this new layer of Hannibal he has uncovered, “ but Snowden went to Hong Kong, though. Maybe there?”

* * *

 

The city hopper is small and crowded, and doesn’t have a business class. Both Will and Hannibal are wedged into their seats, long legs a bit too long for the layout of economy. Its three hours to Hong Kong, and barely half an hour in Will’s left leg is going numb.

On the inflight ‘entertainment’ there’s an international news package, and they both beeline to watch the news’ interpretation of how Abigail escaped from being tortured by Hannibal the Cannibal. Its sensational, inaccurate and farcical, but good television. If Freddie Lounds was employed by CNN, she would be proud of their angle. Abigail looks delicate and pale, showing bruises and beatings, crying prettily for the camera. She talks about how Will is in the same position and has been brainwashed, a little bit stockholm syndrome thrown in with the beatings,  how Hannibal brutalised both of them, kept them drugged, never let them see where they were. How she was dragged around in a suitcase through the slick marble of international airports and how they drove the long, long way across Europe in the trunk of a car before joining the train. She plays up the Russian angle, but she mentions nothing that actually happened. She doesn’t smile at the camera, there’s no lingering look that tells another story. Abigail is a survivor, and she is surviving by telling the story.

Will looks over when the news changes to soccer results. They’re both watching the same thing on their separate screens but Hannibal is a good minute behind. His lips keep pursing unattractively whenever Abigail says a particularly egregious lie. The segment finishes and Hannibal rips off his flimsy headphones like they’re the ones who personally affronted him.

“She did what she had to” Will says, softly, almost drowned out by the droning of the engine.

Hannibal doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a close thing. “She’s keeping a place for you, should you decide to go. She will always be loyal. I had thought it was to me -” he stops, biting back the end of the sentence. If he was anyone else Will would think he was about to cry.

Will reaches across and takes Hannibal’s hand, and is surprised that Hannibal allows it.

The rest of the flight is uneventful, and they arrive in Hong Kong at midday.

Hong Kong is as green and humid as a greenhouse, and to Will’s starved, temperate senses is an explosion of heat and colour, like Dorothy arriving in Oz, the greys of winter shed like a sepia memory.

The airport is built on reclaimed land in one of the world’s most busy shipping lanes, and the drive into the city gives him views of the huge container ships and the workings of a modern, industrial port. It is fascinating, but forgotten as the city bursts into view. They cross a huge bridge, and the city lies across the bay, a template for the fictitious cities of the future, both familiar and foreign at the same time. They wind first through the streets of Kowloon, unmistakably Chinese, but with wide streets named after long dead colonials, fringed with tall, faded apartment blocks with peeling paint on their upper storeys, lined at ground level with endless shops and restaurants and smart, chrome and glass developments in between the broken teeth.

They pull over onto a street and Hannibal gets out, and returns with a sack of fruit, perfect bursting lychees and squat, bulging mangosteens, fruit Will has only had canned, if at all. They sit in the car and idly eat it, not talking, becoming sticky from juices and tense from obviously waiting for something. Will has become good at waiting, the last few months, better even than when he is in the middle of the stream. In this life, there is not long to wait for things to become eventful again.

The humidity is building, and the air feels thick, chewy and dense. Will remembers these days from Louisiana, remembers the endless build of it, never ending until a storm rolled in over the gulf and gave them temporary relief, only to build and break and build and break until the summer finally ended.

At 2pm on the dot, the skies explode. The rain fell harder than he’d ever seen, filling up the street like a flash flood. Lightning arcs across the sky every couple of seconds. Thunder cracked louder than he’d ever heard, shocking him to jump the first few times. It blew itself out in twenty minutes, and by 3pm, it could be like it never happened.

A man in a disposable clear plastic rain jacket over a smart suit knocks on the driver’s side door. Hannibal lowered the window, and the man dropped a package into his lap. The unmistakable jangle of keys made Hannibal smile small and pleased.

“Come.” he says, starting the car. “Let’s go see our new home.”

* * *

 

They drive over into Victoria bay with the top down, Hannibal’s hand on the gear shift, and Will’s hand on top of his. This part of the city, the island of Hong Kong proper, looks half lost in time. Streetcars rattle up and down the roads next to glistening skyscrapers, but the side streets look more like the Kowloon side, all market stalls and street food and the ineffable dirt of the city. They wind up the side of the Peak, the mountain that dominated the skyline of the city before the skyscrapers came, the part of Hong Kong that the British kept for themselves, until they reach one of the many beautiful colonial era buildings nestled among more impossibly green foliage.

Their apartment is on the second floor, and has high ceilings, old marble floors and dark wood door frames. The furniture is shabbier than Hannibal would ever choose, but it is heavy and solid, the kind of furniture that defies replacement because of the sheer effort to move it. It is very much the kind of apartment Will would choose for himself, if he had the choice.

The kitchen is huge, and Hannibal’s contact had stocked it with the essentials, but Will feels emotionally drained from being on the run, and the way that Hannibal loses his train of thought staring at the contents of the fridge leads Will to declare that they should go out.

There’s a beautiful coolness in the air after the thunderstorm, and as they take the escalators down the peak, it feels like they’re finally able to breathe for the first time in months.

* * *

 

In Hong Kong they are anonymous. There are enough white men in the city that they have a degree of anonymity, and there are literally millions of people living in a small space that the sheer population density gives them an ounce of plausible deniability. Still, they moved often over the eighteen months they make the city their home.

Their second apartment was a modern penthouse chosen mostly because Hannibal wanted to be closer to the restaurants off Nathan Road. While entirely more in the style Hannibal preferred, the master bedroom had been done out entirely in mirrors. The weird angles did weirder things to Hannibal, who suddenly spent a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror, frowning slightly and occasionally getting completely lost in thought. It creeped Will out to the point where he slept in the second bedroom on the second night, and after a week he woke to find Hannibal stretched out and snoring next to him on top of the covers. They move again, at the end of the week, this time to a classic third floor walk up in Yau Ma Tei.

Hannibal had thrown himself into improving his Cantonese cooking, and luckily their new neighborhood was known for being the centre of cookware suppliers to the world. Hannibal would go out some afternoons to return with compulsive purchases they would only have to leave behind, industrial woks, elegant serving dishes and huge shiny pots, big enough to require an alibi should someone go missing.

Will, on the other hand, was bored. There’s a thrill to being on the run - the adrenaline either causes you to be so focused on not being caught or completely dead to the world, and no matter how bad it is for your health, living on a diet of takeaway food and cortisol doesn’t allow for much else to enter the mind.

For the first time since puberty Will had no job, he didn’t speak the language, and socialising with English speakers would increase the risk of their being caught. He would run in the morning when it was still cool, and then hang out in a park off Jordan Road watching the old folks doing Tai Chi and the teenagers bunking off from school chatting in rapidfire Cantonese before going shopping on Argyle Street. Then he’d grab a pork bun and an oversweet coffee and head back to the apartment to get under Hannibal’s feet for the rest of the day, until they maybe went out for egg tarts at tea time, a colonial relic that Hannibal adores, or to dinner at somewhere shabby and brusque but with perfect, amazing food.

There are frequent thunderstorms, and for want of something better to do Will takes to dragging Hannibal to bed for an afternoon delight, to be fucked as the heavens open, the savagery of the bucketing rain and deafening thunder a counterpoint to how much Hannibal puts into each delicious thrust.

They make a point of eating eating dim sum on Sunday mornings in a run down shop that produces the best dumplings Hannibal declares he has ever eaten. That Sunday it was raining again, the other kind of rain, thick, fat drops that go on for hours. The rain soaked their trousers up to their knees as they walked there from a couple of streets over. The stern woman who runs the shop frowned at them, but they’re essentially regulars now and so she shakes her head and takes their order paper and puts plastic down beneath their sodden feet. The dumplings are amazing, and her husband nods at them over his steamer baskets.

They’re a few baskets in, and Hannibal puts down his Siu Mai to announce that they should change their appearances more radically.

Hannibal had shaved his head in the first few days they’d been there, and had abandoned his three piece suits for a business casual look. He kept it buzzed, which bought out his cheekbones even more than usual. It was a good look, if a bit contract killer.

“They can do wonderful things with fat transfer these days, Will”, Hannibal says. “Completely redo a face, and then a couple of years later, a few months of dieting and you’ll be back to normal.”

Will picked up the metal teapot and looked at himself in the reflection. It had happened so gradually that only when properly scruitinising his appearance can he see just how much he ahd changed He hadn’t shaved since Beijing, and his beard is longer than he’d ever seen it. He’d also got a good tan, and his hair was shorter than he had ever worn it. But there was something else. Perhaps it is what relaxation looks like.

“Maybe they could add a hump to my nose?” he says, finally. “The nose is the most distinctive part of the face.”

“I think it would be surprising, even to a Triad-endorsed Macau plastic surgeon, for someone to come in with the kind of nose on the after pictures and ask to go to a before.” Hannibal mused. “I also am very partial to it”, leaning over and pressing an amused kiss right on the tip.

The proprietress comes over and puts down another couple of baskets, and Hannibal smiles at her and winks.

* * *

 

After much consultation by email, they took the ferry to Macau two weeks later. In the end, it was Hannibal who got the most work done, mostly to tone down his cheekbones and soften the distinctive line of his jaw. They added fat to his face so carefully that by the time the swelling had gone down a few weeks later, he looked ten years younger, a little less defined, the more extreme of his angles tamed. With the new wardrobe and the buzz cut, he looked enough like a different person that they could start to enjoy the new city.

Will got his ears done, and after much cajoling, a few fillers in his face, but with a full beard and his makeover he looked different enough to pass muster.

They decide to recuperate in Macau, and Hannibal makes plans for them to stay in a suite at one of the Vegas style casinos. It is only when they arrive that Will bursts out laughing. Macau is the Vegas of South East Asia, and with internationalism the way it is, some of the big Vegas hotels have opened versions of their famous strip real estate in the South China Sea. Hannibal, being droll, had booked them into the Venetian.

After checking in, they went for a walk among the strangely toy-like version of the Grand Canal, clean and plastic and under a giant dome to keep the temperature at a more European level. Hannibal has his face in various bandages and post-surgical devices and despite the pain, spends as much time as possible walking around, playing baccarat and poker in the casino and, for the first time in a long time, socialising with people who aren’t Will, Abigail or various criminal gang members to whom he was handing over his fortune.

This unfortunately, turned out not to be a good thing.

Royce Baumgardner was loud, rich and culturally insensitive; the brush every American abroad is tarred with. He claimed to love China because they still let you smoke indoors, but railed at their perceived rudeness, the strangeness of the food, and the frigidness of the women. He loved to play poker, and loved to lose lots of money. Mary, his tiny, birdlike wife had matching bandages to Hannibal - a facelift, her third - and was sweet and Texan and entirely too good for him, in Will’s opinion. He was keeping his distance, in case someone recognised him and put two and two together about who the mysteriously bandaged man he was with was. It wouldn’t take the FBI to work that one out.

Royce is a bad man on many levels, but he doesn’t deserve to die. Will has got familiar with the look in Hannibal’s eye when he is plotting murder, the kind of cold politeness that Americans take for excessive European manners and not for the absolute indicator of seething rage that it actually signifies.

As he watches Royce give Hannibal just enough rope to hang himself with, something in Will decides that he doesn’t want Hannibal to kill anymore. Or more, he doesn’t want Hannibal to need to kill anymore. Hannibal likes to kill, he likes to murder, but as far as Will knew he hadn’t touched anyone other than Will since they arrived in China. He loves what Hannibal can be, and wants that person. Its insane, and he knows it’s insane. Its actual, real Stockholm Syndrome taking hold. He is a good enough profiler to see it in his thought patterns. He is in love with Hannibal, and wants him, wants what he considers to be the real Hannibal, the man he has wined and dined and laughed in the rain with. The one who lets him see him.

He feels physically sick, and excuses himself back to the room. The walk doesn’t lessen his disgust with himself, and he is kneeling on the freezing cold marble floor being sick into the toilet the moment he gets into the room, and then wraps himself with all the blankets in the bed, shaking with it, delerious, until sleep takes him.

Hannibal comes back a couple of hours later, and the Baumgardners don’t turn up for breakfast. He and Hannibal return to Hong Kong later that afternoon.

* * *

 

They take a day trip to some of the outlying islands, and it is there that Will truly falls in love with Hong Kong.

Lamma Island is just a short ferry ride away from the Central docks, but it feels like a different country. The island has just three villages, and the rest is wild, perfect for hiking and fishing, with a few pretty decent beaches. The main town has excellent seafood, and the place has this relaxed, hippy vibe without being overly pretentious. Will has a vision of buying a boat, and over a very good bottle of wine at lunch, he tells Hannibal so. When Hannibal pays the bill, he asks the waiter in rapidly improving Cantonese, to point them to the island’s estate agent.

They move into a duplex apartment on the outskirts of town with a big roof terrace. Will buys a boat from a retiring fisherman whose son is a big banker in the city. They make friends with people on the island, but keep to themselves as much as possible. The view from the roof is amazing, and one day, Will takes a picture of them both on his phone as they sun themselves and honestly doesn’t recognise the faces staring back at him.

A year passes.

Hannibal goes into the city once a week to buy ingredients they can’t get on the island. Sometimes Will goes with him, but mostly he spends afternoons there alone. He never spends more than four hours there, and always comes back in the same clothes he left in. Will doesn’t want to notice these things. He never asked Hannibal to stop killing. The words were on his tongue so often, both in intimate moments and when in the safety of crowds, but they always died before they managed to escape.

The phone rings during dinner. Hannibal was trying his hand at beef brisket soup, and the house smells pleasantly of star anise and long simmering bones. Hannibal gets up from the table where he was reading the local tabloid and answers the phone in his clear-accented Cantonese.

Normally, it is telemarketers at this time, the eternal scourge of mealtimes, and even Will can stutter out ‘mm-ho joy da-lay!’ by now without sounding too foreign, but Hannibal is listening intently to what is happening on the phone. After about 45 seconds he nods to himself, says a brusque ‘thank you’ and hangs up.

He stands there for a moment, until Will lifts his head from his position on the sofa to look at him.

“That was Abigail.” Hannibal says calmly, as if he was discussing their neighbour Amy with the golden retriever. “She said that if she had managed to find us, then they’re probably on their way. We need to go.”

“Can we even trust her?” Will said, though Hannibal’s retreating back answered that for him. Hannibal is pulling their prepacked bags out of the hall cabinet, brushing the dust off them with one hand, while dialing the phone with the other. They’re out of the door, everything abandoned. Will remembers at the last minute to turn the stove off before they leave.

Abigail was obviously a better investigator than she gave herself credit for. Hannibal has them flying out of Macau the next morning, but no one gives them a second look as they board the first flight to a place neither of them had ever heard of.

As the plane takes off, Will can’t help but look back, tempting the fate of Lot's wife. From the altitude it’s impossible for him to tell which island is which, but he watches anyway, until the green disappears beneath the clouds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive apologies for how long it took for this chapter to come about. Personal issues, and then I went on holiday for six weeks. It was glorious, but now I'm back, and this story has grown another chapter. Good news is its because this chapter had to be split in two, and so it will follow soon. Hurrah! 
> 
> Hong Kong is a city I adore, and where I want to spend more time. This is my yearning love story to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Supreme by Robbie Williams, and general inspiration from Go Places by The New Pornographers.  
> Thanks to foolish_mortal for her brainstorming all those months ago when I first started plotting this post-Mizumono epic. 
> 
> This is basically an exercise in writing travel porn, but be aware that this will be also be full of regular porn as well.


End file.
